There’s a cliché that doctors at parties are always being buttonholed when people find out their interesting specialties. Spare a thought, then, for memory expert Charan Ranganath, director of the memory and plasticity programme at the University of California, Davis. Because everyone is interested in –if not downright worried about –their memories.
“Nine times out of 10, people will say, ‘Oh, you should study me. I have a really bad memory,’” says Ranganath. “But with the 10th out of 10 I get, ‘Oh, I’ve got a great memory’, or occasionally, ‘I don’t remember unless I can visualise something. Do you know anything about that?’ There are interesting questions.”
Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, comes at such questions differently from most of us. He’s not concerned about remembering more. In fact, he has turned down requests to write selfhelp books on the subject. “There are lots of good books out there on the topic. Iwanted to say: ‘Well, what’s optimal for memory in the first place?’ And to get to that, you have to understand what memory is for.”
Which you might
