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When is forgetting normal — and when is it worrisome? A neuroscientist weighs in
Cognitive neuroscientist Charan Ranganath says the human brain isn’t programmed to remember everything. Rather, it’s designed to “carry what we need and to deploy it rapidly when we need it.”
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Cognitive neuroscientist Charan Ranganath says the human brain isn’t programmed to remember everything. Rather, it’s designed to “carry what we need and to deploy it rapidly when we need it.”
Bulat Silvia/iStock / Getty Images Plus
When cognitive neuroscientist Charan Ranganath meets someone for the first time, he’s often asked, “Why am I so forgetful?” But Ranganath says he’s more interested in what we remember, rather than the things we forget.
“We’re not designed to carry tons and tons of junk with us. I don’t know that anyone would want to remember every temporary password that they’ve ever had,” he says. “I think what [the human brain is] designed for is to carry what we need and to deploy it rapidly when we need it.”
Ranganath directs the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, where he’s a professor of psychology and neuroscience. In the new book, Why We Remember, he writes about the fundamental mechanisms of memory — and why memories often change over time.
Ranganath recently wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which he reflected on President Biden’s memory gaffes — and the role that memory plays in the current election cycle.
“I’m just not in the position to say anything about the specifics of [either Biden or Trump’s] memory problems,” he says. “This is really more of an issue of people understanding what happens with aging. And, one of the nice things about writing this editorial is I got a lot of feedback from people who felt personally relieved by this because they’re worried about their own memories.”
Interview highlights
On instituting a cognitive test for candidates running for president
I think it would be a good idea to have a comprehensive physical and mental health evaluation that’s fairly transparent. We certainly have transparency or seek transparency about other things like a candidate’s finances, for instance. And obviously health is a very important factor. And I think at the end of the day, we’ll still be in a position of saying, “OK, what’s enough? What’s the line between healthy and unhealthy?” But I think it’s important to do because yes, as we get older we do have memory problems. …
On why you can sometimes only remember the first letter of something, like a name
You get what’s called partial retrieval, where you get a piece of the information but not the whole thing. … Memories compete with each other. And this is true for a name. This could be true for memory, for an event. And so if you have learned multiple names that start with the letter K, now what happens is you have this competition where essentially they’re fighting with each other.
On the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
They call it the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon … where you know the information is there, you’re aware of something, but it just doesn’t. You don’t have proof of its existence. You’re just working on this complete faith that it exists. There’s many reasons why this happened. One of the big ones is you pull out the wrong information. When you pull out the wrong information, what happens is it makes it much harder to find the right information. So in other words, if you’re looking for someone named “Fred” and you accidentally pull out “Frank” and you know that’s not the name. Now, Frank is very big in your consciousness, and it’s fighting against the other memory that you have. And so as a result, you’re going to have some trouble. Now, later on, what happens is your mindset changes and you’re no longer stuck in that previous mistake. And that’s why it can pop up. So what can sometimes happen is that we’re looking for something, but then we get the wrong thing. And that leads us so far in the wrong direction that the competition in memory works against us.
On how interruption hurts our ability to remember
This is the reality of modern life, is that we’re constantly being interrupted. Now, sometimes those interruptions are in our world and not of our own making. So any person with a newborn child, for instance, can relate to this idea of you’re trying to do something and all of a sudden your child starts crying and your brain is telling you, “Forget everything else. Let’s focus on this.” Then there’s things that we do to ourselves, like, we just have other thoughts that come into our head or we start daydreaming about things. But then I think the most insidious of all are the alerts and the distractions that we put upon ourselves with smartphones and smartwatches where there’s things constantly buzzing and grabbing our attention, and then people start to get bad habits like checking texts and emails. For instance, I’ll sit in academic talks and I see people checking email during a talk, and I can guarantee you they’re not remembering either the email or the talk after they’ve left the place.
On how stress interferes with memory
Stress has a bunch of complex effects on memory. So if you have a severely stressful experience, sometimes you can remember that experience better than if it was not stressful. And so this happens a lot in cases of traumatic memories. But the other part of it is that stress makes it harder to pull out the information you need when you need it. … It shuts down the prefrontal cortex. And under those states of stress, you’re prioritizing things that are more immediate, your knee-jerk responses to things. And so that makes it harder to remember stuff that happened before you were under stress.
Then there’s the issue of chronic stress, where we know that chronic stress can be actually neurotoxic for areas of the brain that are important for memory, like the prefrontal cortex and another area called the hippocampus. And that is really, I think, part of the problem that you see in people with PTSD, for instance. If you’re under chronic stress for a long period of time, there’s a whole series of stress-related hormones that are bathing your brain in these stress-related hormones. And what can happen is, this can be causing damage to areas like the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex so that they’re no longer functioning as efficiently as you would hope they would. And you can see this in many different animal models of stress.
On why sleep is so important to memory
One of the fascinating things about sleep is we tend to think, oh, nothing’s happening. I’m not getting anything done. But your brain is hugely at work. There are all these different stages of sleep where you can see these symphony of waves, where different parts of the brain are talking to each other, essentially. And so, we know for a fact that some of these stages of sleep, what happens is the brain will flush out toxins, like the amyloid protein that can build up over the course of a day. So just by virtue of that function, sleep is very important. But then on top of it, what we can see is that the neurons that were active during a particular experience, have come back alive during sleep. And so there seems to be some processing of memories that happen during sleep, and that the processing of memories can sometimes lead to some parts of the memory being strengthened, or sometimes you’re better able to integrate what happened recently with things that happened in the past. And so, sleep scientist Matt Walker likes to say that sleep converts memory into wisdom, for instance.
[Sleep is] an investment. Because you’re depriving your brain of all this, information processing that can happen in your sleep. And I do believe it’s controversial, but I do believe in the idea that sometimes you can wake up and through that memory processing, actually have the ability to solve a problem that you couldn’t do when you were, before you went to sleep. I mean, the other part of sleep, I think that’s very important is when we’re sleep deprived it’s just terrible for memory. All the circuitry that’s important for memory does not function as well, and memory performance really declines.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Carmel Wroth adapted it for the web.
Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet in 2019’s Little Women, written and directed by Greta Gerwig.
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“Wuthering Heights” is in theaters, so we’re thinking about the best book to film adaptations of all time.
What’s your favorite movie that started life as a book — and what makes for a great book-to-film adaptation, anyway? Do you want filmmakers to stay as rigorously true to the book as possible? Or are you okay with bold departures, big swings, out-of-left-field choices that evoke the essence of the book, if not every last detail?
“Wuthering Heights,” for example, takes a middle road. Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s film keeps the familiar plot beats firmly in place, and casts actors who embody all the stuff that fans of the book need them to, but steeps them in the delirious hormones of a teenage fever-dream. Thus, Margot Robbie’s Cathy is headstrong, impetuous … and horny, while Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff is broody, Byronic … and horny. The two spend most of the movie trading lusty looks in the soaking rain as peals of thunder roll over the moors. Every set, every costume is styled to the gods. It’s a breathlessly over-the-top take that’s divided critics and is about to do the same for audiences this weekend.
We’ve got four examples of other beloved books that made the transition to the big screen. Here’s why we think each of them works, and why we believe they’re the best of all time.
Little Women (2019)
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This movie version of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 story about the March sisters is adapted and directed by Greta Gerwig. Gerwig does the impossible task of contemporizing the story while staying so faithful to the book. She does two things that haven’t worked in any other Little Women adaptations: She makes me tolerate the love story between Laurie and Amy. (I still have PTSD from the 1994 version.) And Gerwig allows for Jo — the protagonist, a liberated author who is writing her own story along the way — to have her cake and eat it too.
In the 19th century approach to this story, the woman has to have a man at the end. That’s just a given for these kinds of books and for these kinds of adaptations. But Gerwig made a decision that the writing of the book is essential to the plot line, and that within the book, Jo’s character ends up with a man — a scholar named Bhaer. But in reality, the book is the man — getting her first book published is the win — and that is her love. It’s so rich and smart. I just love it. — B.A. Parker, host of NPR’s Code Switch podcast
Nickel Boys (2024)
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Nickel Boys was originally Colson Whitehead’s book about a boy wrongly sent to an abusive boys school in Florida during the Jim Crow era. It becomes a story about his friendship with another boy there. Within five minutes of watching the movie, I was hooked and felt like I was seeing something really new. Not just new in that it was different from the book, which I really respect. But because the whole thing is told from this immersive camera point of view — and because you are in the head, really in the head of the person experiencing it, it is somehow more immersive even than the book. Sometimes, watching narratives that have descriptions of truly awful things — like Boys Don’t Cry and 12 Years a Slave — I find myself covering my eyes. But because of the point of view in Nickel Boys, I couldn’t. It not only showed me what it was, it showed me what it felt.
Director RaMell Ross is saying something about the experience of reading about these two boys being so badly abused in Jim Crow-era Florida. He’s also saying something about the way that we view it. He is saying something about how anyone who wants to see these things on screen should really think about how we have them in our heads, how they are portrayed to us, and how we react to that portrayal. It’s stunning, and I was absolutely jaw dropped about it. — Barrie Hardymon, editor, NPR investigations
Blade Runner (1982)
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Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? became the 1982 film Blade Runner. Both the movie and the book are set in a future where androids are used as slave labor. Six androids escape, and a cop named Rick Deckard — how’s that for a perfect, hard-nosed, noirish name? — has to hunt them down.
Look, there are book people and there are movie people. I’ve visited the Reddit threads; I know that a lot of book people/Philip K. Dick fans hate this movie. But I would argue that the book does what books do well, and the film does what films do well. When you read a book, you live inside it — you’re intellectually and emotionally invested, because you create its world in your mind. And in this book, the author dutifully outfits you with absolutely everything you need to know, and somehow more: You learn about the nuclear war that left big areas of the planet uninhabitable. You learn about this fallout called dust. You learn a lot about how class and status works, and why people are headed to off-world colonies. There is also a tremendous lot about a religion called Mercerism, which is founded on the notion of empathy as the highest human attribute.
The movie carves out the thinnest possible slice of the book — the action, the hunting androids part. And while it pays deference to some of the book’s big ideas, it doesn’t concern itself with all that weighty lore and backstory. It doesn’t need to, that’s not what it’s for. After all, you’re not living in this dystopian future, as you are when you read the book. You’re just visiting it for a couple hours. Androids builds the world, but Blade Runner trots you nimbly through it, doing what films do: Swapping out all those blocks of prose for the fluid visual language of cinematic mood, action and performance. — Glen Weldon, critic and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast
Starship Troopers (1997)
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My pick is a movie in which the director, Paul Verhoeven, straight up hates the source material, detests it and makes fun of it: 1997’s Starship Troopers. The 1959 book by Robert Heinlein is about space cadets and a guy named Johnny Rico going through cadet school and learning the philosophies of being in the military, and why it’s cool to live in a society in which only people who fight in the military can vote. The movie takes that premise and says — this idea: kind of fascist, right? It’s a hilarious parody of Heinlein’s book.
And yet, if you are a mouth breather, not fully understanding how it’s working on a metatextual level, the movie itself kind of rocks as propaganda, as a piece of action filmmaking. It feels like I’m watching Top Gun. Everybody’s extraordinarily good looking. It came out in the late nineties, but I first watched it on TV, and have always thought of it as a post-9/11 movie, in the context of being in school where people were trying to recruit us to join the military. It feels like an extension of Verhoeven’s RoboCop in a lot of ways, how everybody is acting not quite stiff, but extra. Everybody’s got a little asterisks on all of their lines. — Andrew Limbong, culture reporter and host of NPR’s Book of the Day podcast
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I’m so disheartened at the ability of men to work through their emotions. I’ve been chronically lovebombed and ghosted. I changed therapists, did nine months of celibacy, started dating slow and sober, chose more “stable” types and it still happens the same way every time — they ghost and get back with a less challenging ex who they feel more control over, because with them, they’re not required to grow or change. I have a Capricorn Sun, a Taurus Moon, and a Libra ascendant, with Venus in Pisces. Help.
I’m going to (very lovingly and gently) hold your hand when I say this — the fact that you are doing everything “right” and following what you (and even professionals) believe to be the most evolved and healthy way of doing things, does not guarantee that your ideal romantic relationship will materialize in your life at the time that you want it to. Or even in the way that you want it to.
Women are the most empowered they have ever been to be the sorceress of their own success — especially materially. As a Capricorn woman, no doubt you’ve made dedicated efforts toward optimizing your experience of life, and seen well-deserved results. Your frustration at not seeing the same outcome manifest in your dating life is understandable, particularly considering the often-infuriating tendency of men to be less emotionally evolved. (This, of course, is a direct result of how society has, for millenniums, not provided them with the incentive to be anything more than the equivalent of sentient pools of stagnant fleshwater). However, love and relationships constitute a completely different realm, where the rules of girlbossery do not apply. And thank God for that, because don’t us hardworking women deserve a break from having to control everything?
The point of optimism here is that women who have made the commitment to love themselves are providing the societal structure needed to incentivize men to do the same. Women do that with the power of choice. In refusing to engage men who do not meet our needs for partnership, we set a standard that, with time, they will be forced to meet if they indeed do desire the companionship of women. Which they should if they also love themselves. Statistically, men who are equipped to form meaningful long-term relationships with women enjoy better lifelong mental, emotional and physical health, with an increased quality of life as a whole.
The complexity of the situation lies here: The invisible yet palpable alchemy of two souls dancing with each other through life in harmony is just that — a dance. Yes, choreography can add much-needed order and structure to an artistic work. But what makes a dance truly inspiring is the intuitive improvisational style of the dancers themselves, one that can’t necessarily be mapped out and predicted. Humans are not financial milestones or career accolades. They are not an impeccably furnished apartment, or a satisfyingly executed Pilates sequence at the end of a long workweek. Humans are gorgeously asymmetrical, thrillingly undefinable, wonderfully unpredictable — a work of art authored by an infinitely inspired Creator.
The invisible yet palpable alchemy of two souls dancing with each other through life in harmony is just that — a dance.
Goth Shakira wears a Miss Claire Sullivan corset and skirt, Shushu/Tong shoes, Blumarine earring, Hirotaka earring, Pianegonda ring, Xeno underwear and stylist’s own collar.
The magic of encountering a lover who moves your soul involves realizing that while there exists a person who does encapsulate a smattering of critical non-negotiable traits on your list (the “choreography”), it would not be the magic of love without understanding that there are things you could have never predicted you would adore in the first place (the alchemy). It can be anything from a particular vernacular that they only employ when they’re deeply moved, or the way the light falls across a one-in-8-billion facial structure you could never have dreamed of. When we try to control all of the parameters of our attraction and devotion, we leave no room for the great Dancer to improvise the next move in our life. Creativity needs space. And love comes down to divine timing and fortune. That can feel like a threat to the girlboss part of your brain. But it can feel like a salve to the lover girl part of your soul, if you let it.
So what to do about your underwhelming past lovers, your Pisces Venusian yearning, your throbbing heart, your efforts to prepare yourself to love from the most whole place you possibly can? Reframe your mission. Instead of your ultimate goal being the acquisition of an ideal partnership, your task should be becoming the best lover you could possibly be. You’re already doing that.
There is a lot of discourse these days about decentering men, which is healthy. I would go so far as to say that we need to go one step further, by decentering partnership, and centering love. Being alive is an act of love. Let life itself romance you. Be courageous enough to ask it to, every day if you need to. Practice romance in every human connection you have in the exquisite life your sweet Taurus Moon has created for you. Invest, especially, in love of self. Because we can’t wait for men to catch up to us. They need to take responsibility for the quality of life they want in the same way we are. Let them flail. Let them be inadequate. Let them be disappointing. Let them show you if they can’t keep up. And thank the universe for that information, because that is a blessing that shows you when you need to move on to what actually serves you. Trust that your person, the one that is more of a reverie that even your own mind could conjure for itself, will arrive in your life not a moment too soon, nor a moment too late. Enjoy the agency you have over what you can always control, which is your approach to life, your reactions to whatever may occur within it and the degree to and depth at which you choose to love yourself. Know that true love feels peaceful and calm, and trust that you’ll be able to recognize that feeling when it arrives.
Blumarine jacket, vintage Jean Paul Gaultier top from Wild West Social House, Jane Wade bra, vintage Maison Margiela pants from Wild West Social House, Narcisz Made shoes, Pianegonda ring, Thirty1 Ring and Ariel Taub earrings.
Reality can hurt, but it presents the gift of sanity. If you know your husband wouldn’t treat you like that, great — that’s not your husband. With every impostor removed from your life, more space is created for your person to move in. Keep doing the things that make you feel powerful and whole. Practice love in all of its forms. Use the skills you’re developing along your journey to be the best friend, family member, colleague, neighbor and lover of self — and above all, lover of life — that you can be. Love yourself by letting go of what was, thankfully, never ours to control in the first place — the divine divination of love. If you position that as your true purpose, a man’s failure to live up to your expectations will cease to debilitate you. You might even end up feeling grateful for it.
In need of relationship advice? Our columnist holds court in a starry place to answer your heart’s questions about love. Submit your inquiries here.
Photography Eugene Kim
Styling Britton Litow
Hair and makeup Jaime Diaz
Visual direction Jess Aquino de Jesus
Production Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photo assistant Joe Elgar
Styling assistant Wendy Gonzalez Vivaño
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