You know, I was having dinner with my family the other night telling a story, and right in the middle of it, my wife said, wait, that's not what happened.

And I thought to myself, okay, this is kind of classic during the holidays, right? You're around the table, swapping stories.

And suddenly it feels like

everyone lived a slightly different version of the exact same moment. That was wild. And it got me

wondering, how could that be? How can two people, same place, same event, same time, and yet

remember it completely differently.

Why do I remember something and my brother doesn't?

Why do me and my sister have very different recounts of the same exact experience we have?

My guest today is Dr. Cygney Sheldon.

She's an associate professor of psychology at McGill University who researches how our brains store

memories and why some of us lock on to these sights and sounds while others remember the feeling

of the story, the meaning, the takeaway. And you know with the holidays coming up, we're probably

going to be sitting around sharing a lot of stories. So I decided it'd be a good time to dig a little deeper into this

topic. How do we tell stories with the people we love in a way that helps us connect

instead of giving us a reason to disagree? I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and this is chasing life.

So I just wanted to tell you that just the whole idea behind the work that you do, I think,

is endlessly fascinating and so intimate to how people,

I think, recount stories. And how did you originally get interested in this area?

Well, how I got interested in memory comes from the fact that I do have a large family.

And we have a lot of shared experiences. So I have six siblings. And there was a lot of experiences that we would have. And then we

come back and we would all recount that event quite differently. So there was this one memory I have of

my brother and I were biking and I fell off my bike. And then this person swooped out of a limo, came in and helped me off my bike.

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