Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory's Power to Hold on to What Matters
Book by Charan Ranganath, PhD (2024)
291-page Hardback story ends on 194
Genre: Nonfiction, Science > Neuroscience > Memory and Cognition; Psychology, Self-Help, Health
Featuring: Meet Your Remembering Self, The Fundamentals of Memory, Why We Remember Some Things and Forget Others, Making the Right Connections, Attention and Intention, The Care and Feeding of Your Prefrontal Cortex, Mindful Memories, How Remembering Takes Us Back to a Place and Time, Mental Time Traveling, How We Can Remember More by Memorizing Less, The Unseen Forces, Why Remembering is Inextricably Linked With Imagination, Why Our Memories Are Different From The Feelings We Have About Them, All Around Me Are Familiar Faces, How We Learn, Even When We Don’t Remember; How Memory Orients Us To What is New and Unexpected,
How Remembering Changes Our Memories, Memory Updating, False Confessions and Misinformed Witnesses; Some Pain, More Gain Why We Can Learn More When We Make Mistakes, When We Remember Together How Memories Are Shaped by Our Social Interactions. Coda: Dynamic Memories, Notes, Bibliography, Index
Rating as a movie: PG-13
Songs for the soundtrack: "Blah Blah Blah" by Hüsker Dü, "Op. 78: No. 1, Russia Under the Mongolian Yoke" by“Russia Under the Mongolian Yoke,” by Sergei Prokofiev, "Born in the U.S.A." by Bruce Springsteen and E Street Band, "Love Of A Lifetime" by FireHouse, "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, "The Alphabet Song," "My Sweet Lord" by George Harrison, "He's So Fine" by The Chiffons, "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley & His Comets
Books and Authors mentioned: The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology by Hermann Ebbinghaus, Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault, The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum, Michelle Remembers by Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber, Inception by Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey by Homer
Memorable Quotes: Although we tend to believe that we can and should remember anything we want, the reality is we are designed to forget, which is one of the most important lessons to be taken from the science of memory. As we will explore in this chapter, as long as we are mindful of how we remember and why we forget, we can make sure to create memories for our most important moments that will stick around.
Think of memory like a desk cluttered with crumpled-up scraps of paper. If you’d scribbled your online banking password on one of those scraps of paper, it will take a good deal of effort and luck to find it. This is not unlike the challenge of remembering. If we have experiences that are, more or less, the same—like the meaningless trigrams Ebbinghaus struggled to memorize—it becomes exponentially harder to find the right memory when we need it. But if your password is written on a hot-pink Post-it note, it will stand out among all the other notes on your desk and you can find it pretty easily. Memory works the same way. The experiences that are the most distinctive are the easiest to remember because they stand out relative to everything else. So how do we make memories that stand out in our cluttered minds? The answer: attention and intention. Attention is our brain’s way of prioritizing what we are seeing, hearing, and thinking about. At any given moment, we could be paying attention to a multitude of things going on around us. All too often, our attention is grabbed by what is in our environment. In the imagined scenario I described earlier, you might briefly have focused on your keys before your attention was captured by what you were confronted with after opening the door. Even if you pay attention to the most important thing to remember (i.e., those keys you’re going to need in an hour when you realize you’re running late to pick up your partner at the airport), that doesn’t necessarily help you make a distinctive memory that will overcome all the interference from everything else that captured your attention (the exuberant dog, the funky garbage smell in the kitchen, and the sound of Kajagoogoo emanating from your daughter’s bedroom). This is where intention comes in. To create a memory that you can locate later on, you need to use intention to guide your attention to lock on to something specific. The next time you put down an object you frequently lose track of, such as your keys, take a moment to focus on something that is unique to that specific time and place, such as the color of the countertop, or the stack of unopened mail next to the keys. With a little mindful intention, we can combat our brain’s natural inclination to tune out the things we do routinely and build more distinctive memories that have a fighting chance against all the interfering clamor.
What makes episodic memory such a powerful force is that it’s not just for accessing the past. Part of our fundamental perception of reality is our ability in the present to orient ourselves in time and space, and we often have to recall the recent past to do so. Think of a time you woke up in the middle of the night in an unfamiliar bed and your first thought was “Where am I?” To help you answer this question, the hippocampus gets to work pulling up the right memory code; maybe you recall that, a few hours ago, you checked into a hotel, and with that information the moment of disorientation quickly passes. Pulling up a memory of the recent past helps to ground you in the here and now. According to one prominent theory, episodic memory emerged in evolution from the more basic ability to learn where we are in the world.
Fake news is easier to digest if it comes in a flavor we already like.
My rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟🧠💭🤯
My thoughts: 📖 Page 11 of 291 [Chapter] 1 Where Is My Mind? Why We Remember Some Things and Forget Others. - I picked this book up because the cover was pretty [it's a blue sky with a single cloud], and I'm nosy. I'm thrilled to learn this book is going to explain why I can tell you what book or song I was enjoying during certain, often minute, events; and why we can remember songs we haven't played in 30 years but forget our password we made 5 minutes ago. I'm excited, but I need some fiction sugar before I take the deep dive.
📖85 [Chapter] 5. More Than a Feeling Why our memories are different from the feelings we have about them - This is turning into a class via literature.
There are so many fascinating lessons that I wish I had the time to dictate into my review, but they are long. I may have to revisit this book in a few years. Chapters 3 and beyond were gold. I had to stop dictating books and just read this book. I have too many books to get through at the moment, plus I have a lot of work to do, so I just read and enjoyed the knowledge. Most of the books are listed in the Bibliography in the back, along with tons that weren't mentioned. The jist of this book is stress, and emotions help you remember, but there was a lot more to it than that, but basically it explains why I remember the books I loved and hated for decades and the okay ones get 6 weeks to a year. Being an anxious soul, it also explains why I have packed so much of my childhood and trips into my memory, and the songs, oh, the songs! The reason why I need maps is because I'm always doing something else when I drive, even if it's in my head. This book explains how memories help us predict, and I think all Freida McFadden books are just quits of other stories as well as why companies pay millions for a 30-second commercial. It also explains all of those people who think Shazaam happened.
Recommend to others: Yes! This book is great. I hope a great author reads this book and uses the information for a thriller novel.