Charan Ranganath: evaluation

Transcript context

…You know what? There’s an interesting moment, you probably have experienced this. I remember a good friend of mine, Joe Rogan, I was on his podcast, and we were randomly talking about soccer, football, somebody I grew up watching Diego Armando Maradona, one of the greatest soccer players of all time. We were talking about him and his career and so on, and Joe asked me if he’s still around. I said, ” Yeah.” I don’t know why I thought, “Yeah,” because that was a perfect example of memories. He passed away. I tweeted about it, how heartbroken I was, all this kind of stuff a year before. I know this, but in my mind, I went back to the thing I’ve done many times in my head of visualizing some of the epic runs he had on goal and so on. So for me, he’s alive. Part of also the conversation when you’re talking to Joe, there’s stress and the focus is allocated. The attention is allocated in a particular way. But when I walked away, I was like, “In which world was Diego Maradona still alive?” ‘Cause I was sure in my head that he was still alive. It’s a moment that sticks with me. I’ve had a few like that in my life where it just… obvious things just disappear from mind, and it’s cool. It shows actually the power of the mind in the positive sense to erase memories you want erased maybe, but I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a good explanation for that. One of the cool things that I found is that some people really just revolutionize a field by creating a problem that didn’t exist before. It’s why I love science is engineering is like solving other people’s problems and science is about creating problems. I’m just much more like I want to break things and create problems, not necessarily move fast, though. But one of my former mentors, Marcia Johnson, who in my opinion is one of the greatest memory researchers of all time, she comes up young woman in the field in this mostly guy field. She gets into this idea of how do we tell the difference between things that we’ve imagined and things that we actually remember? How do we tell, I get some mental experience, where did that mental experience come from? It turns out this is a huge problem because essentially our mental experience of remembering something that happened, our mental experience of thinking about something, how do you tell the difference? They’re both largely constructions in our head, and so it is very important. The way that you do it is, it’s not perfect, but the way that we often do it and succeed is by, again, using our prefrontal cortex and really focusing on the sensory information or the place in time and the things that put us back into when this information happened. If it’s something you thought about, you’re not going to have all of that vivid detail as you do for something that actually happened, but it doesn’t work all the time. But that’s a big thing that you have to do. But it takes time. It’s slow, and it’s again, effortful, but that’s what you need to remember accurately. But what’s cool, and I think this is what you alluded to about how that was an interesting experience is, imagination is exactly the opposite. Imagination is basically saying, “I’m just going to take all this information from memory, recombine it in different ways and throw it out there.” So for instance, Dan Schachter and Donna Addis have done cool work on this. Demis Hassabis did work on this with Eleanor McGuire in UCL, and this goes back actually to this guy, Frederic Bartlett, who is this revolutionary memory researcher, Bartlett. He actually rejected the whole idea of quantifying memory. He said, “There’s no statistics in my book.” He came from this anthropology perspective and short version of the story is he just asked people to recall things. You give people stories and poems, ask people to recall them. tatistics in my book.” He came from this anthropology perspective and short version of the story is he just asked people to recall things. You give people stories and poems, ask people to recall them. What we found was people’s memories didn’t reflect all of the details of what they were exposed to, and they did reflect a lot more… they were filtered through this lens of prior knowledge; the cultures that they came from, the beliefs that they had, the things they knew. So what he concluded was that he called remembering an imaginative construction, meaning that we don’t replay the past, we imagine how the past could have been by taking bits and pieces that come up in our heads. Likewise, he wrote this beautiful paper on imagination saying when we imagine something and create something, we’re creating it from these specific experiences that we’ve had and combining it with our general knowledge. But instead of trying to focus it on being accurate and getting out one thing, you’re just ruthlessly recombining things without any necessary goal in mind, or at least that’s one kind of creation.…

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