The above quote comes from neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, author of “Why We Remember.”
The pictures our memories paint depend on what we consciously (or unconsciously) believe we need to remember:
“I always tell people the biggest memory hack I can give is to tell people, what do you want? Ask yourself, what do I want to remember in the first place? What’s the important thing that I need to take away from this?”
On the relationship binding emotion, trauma and memory:
“The brain is wired in a way to preferentially keep memories for things that are emotionally significant. And the reason is our emotions are tied to, they’re not equivalent to, but they’re tied to these motivational circuits in the brain that are trying to keep us alive, right?
And so, often when people have a traumatic event, they feel an existential threat, and they’re often arousing or stressful. And there’s chemicals in our brain that are released during these experiences, noradrenaline is one, cortisol is a stress hormone, there’s gobs of hormones that are released during stress…
And this brings me to another point that I like to bring up to people who tell me, can you help me forget this experience?…
I never ever, every time I hear this, I feel like a lot of empathy and I don’t say this in a trivial manner. But you don’t want to forget those experiences. You want to be able to remember them without that emotional punch in the face, right? Lots of people who do survive traumas can do that. The brain has natural ways.
Memory is core to maintenance of individual and collective identities:
“We also have those ideas about ourself called a self schema. And I think this is important because a big part of imagination and planning is understanding a little bit about who we are and why we do things. We don’t just remember the past in terms of regurgitating a bunch of details. When we’re really remembering events, we stitch it into causes and effects…
Your experience might be different than the experience of your parents or siblings. But once you share those experiences with each other, it’s no longer your memory. Just the act of expressing that memory in a way that someone else can understand it changes the memory for you.
And then now the other person has a memory for something they’ve never experienced before because you’ve told them about it. And so as these memories go get passed back and forth, they’re constantly modified, right? And I think this is key to what makes humans so successful in the world is that we can build memories that benefit from other people’s experiences and wisdom.”
Ranganath says our ability to share collective memories can also be a weakness in that it makes us prone to remembering things that are not true, but which feel true because they have become a core part of our shared identity. This tendency to protect our shared collective memories makes us vulnerable to those who know how to manipulate shared memory in ways that lead us to serve their interests rather than our own.
From The Gray Area with Sean Illing: How memory changes you, Aug 21, 2026
—
Explore・Define・Iterate・Transform
Context ・ Intention ・ Action ・ Outcome
—
Agency (主体性) + Purpose (志) + Growth (成長) + Connection (繋がり) + Contribution (貢献) = Meaning (意義)
In the space between you and me awaits all that will ever be.
人と人の間に全てのもと
Quotes come from: “How Memory Changes Us” on The Gray Area with Sean Illing
Links to previous essays on related topics:
© Dana Cogan, 2026, all rights reserved.