Charan Ranganath, Ph.D.

Charan Ranganath admits he can be forgetful. This is true of most people, but most people are not leading experts on the neuroscience of human memory.

“Everybody knows I have a terrible memory,” said Ranganath, a professor of psychology and core faculty member at the Center for Neuroscience, “and yet I got a Ph.D., and I publish papers all the time. I'm totally functional, so maybe the expectations we have are just wrong.”

Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology, core faculty member at the Center for Neuroscience and director of the UC Davis Memory and Plasticity Program, has been selected for a Psychonomic Society 2022 Mid-Career Award for his research on the science of human memory.

People love stories. We find it easier to remember events when they are part of an overarching narrative. But in real life, the chapters of a story don’t follow smoothly one from another. Other things happen in between. A new brain imaging study from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, shows that the hippocampus is the brain’s storyteller, connecting separate, distant events into a single narrative. The work is published Sept. 29 in Current Biology.