This week on Consider This, we look into the message underneath Trump's military parade, also the administration's revamped travel ban, and how the chaotic new aid operation in Gaza turned deadly.

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This is Fresh Air. I'm David B. and Cooley. Do you ever walk into a room and forget why you're there,

or read a book or watch a movie, and years later can't remember a thing about them?

Charon Ranganath is a neurologist who studies memory, and what he's about to say might make

you feel better about your memory.

When Ranganath meets someone, the question he's most often asked is, why am I so forgetful?

He says, we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for.

The mechanisms of memory, he says, were not cobbled

together to help us remember the name of that guy we met at that thing. Instead of asking,

why do we forget, we should really be asking, why do we remember? And that's the question he's

been researching for about 25 years with the help of brain imaging techniques.

Sharon Ranganath directs the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California Davis,

where he's a professor at the Center for Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology.

His book is called Why We Remember, and it's out in paperback.

Terry Gross spoke with him last year.

Sharon Ranganath, welcome to Fresh Air.

It's a pleasure to have you here.

I learned so much about memory.

I want to tell you, I've had proper noun issues for years or decades.

And sometimes, if anything that starts with a capital letter, a person's name, a movie,

...