Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the show. In the past, we've spoken a lot about how sleep is

interrelated in an incredibly intimate way with learning and memory. I thought, why don't we do an in-depth episode on a very simple topic? How does memory work?

What is memory? And what are the implications once we really understand what memory is?

There is someone who has such an astute, in-depth, truly exceptional understanding of memory and human

memory specifically. And that is my guest today, Dr. Charan Ranganath. He is a renowned neuroscientist.

He is the author of a book, a new book, which you should absolutely buy,

if you're fascinated by any of this, why we remember unlocking memory's power to hold on

to what matters. Dr. Ranganath is the director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, and his groundbreaking

research, I think it's fair to say, it's really reshaped our understanding of how human memory

works specifically. We've already spoken of memories as these individual isolate little islands that sit within our brain.

But we've also spoken a little bit when we spoke about semantic memory as to how we are

adding to that to build these general gestalt, these here is how the world works.

Is this the case?

Should we not think of memories as these tiny little

fragment islands like a individual file on our laptop? Our laptops were arguably much better at

retaining each element of information than our brains were, as you've described. But they're not intelligent. Our minds were much more

intelligent because they seem to then take things that we've been learning and then intersect

them with all of our back catalogue of information to build webs of association that are stored

in these distributed networks. So is it true that memory isn't quite just like a collection of all of these individual files

in all of these different folders?

And if that is true that they're richly interconnected, why would the brain have evolved

a memory system to interconnect and build associational webs versus keeping everything

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