Dr Charan Ranganath

American cognitive neuroscientist at UC Davis whose Why We Remember synthesizes decades of memory research — explaining how memory actually works, why we forget what we forget and remember what we remember, and how to harness memory for learning.

Provides the most accessible and rigorous popular account of memory science — explaining that memory is not recording but reconstruction, that emotion and novelty are the primary memory consolidation signals, and that forgetting is often adaptive rather than failure.