Prof. Charan Ranganath

I might grab a bag of chips or something like that.

And then I come back to the room and boom, it comes back to me.

Right.

Now, the fact that it comes back to me says that I did have that memory.

I didn't lose it, but I couldn't find it in the moment.

Right.

I have to mentally time travel back and I have to leap across these different rooms, basically, in my mind to get back to this moment in time and remember what happened.

Yes, exactly.

Isn't that great?

You've already learned something today that you need to get lotion.

So yeah, and this is one of the hardest things that the brain has to do is remembering to do something in the future.

Because once the future comes, that context is different.

And so how do you remember it later on?

It's a miracle that we ever do this properly, right?

So if I want to remember what I need to do in the kitchen, what I really should do is imagine myself in the kitchen.

While I'm still in my office, imagine myself in the kitchen and imagine myself basically finding my glasses and being happy that I found my glasses, right?

So what's really fascinating about that is I've planted a memory.

I've sort of done an inception thing where I've sort of implanted a memory in myself so that later on when I walk into the kitchen, that memory just pops up again, right?

And that's basically the smart way of doing it, which I never do.

I forget to do that, exactly.