SAN JOSE, Calif. — Amit Biligiri, a junior at Evergreen Valley High School in San Jose, Calif., sits on a big, right-angle couch in his living room alongside his mom, Kalyani Urs. They're recounting the story of a fight they've often had — that every teenager has with their parents.
Amit says he's often up late, and his mom, who tends to work late, "would be mad at me and say, 'Hey Amit, why are you going to sleep so late?'"
Urs laughs. Getting Amit to go to sleep, she says, has been "a constant battle."
"I was like, 'I'm not really sleepy,'" Amit remembers telling her. "And I looked into this, and I found out that the sleep cycle for teenagers is actually delayed by a few hours. And that means that teenagers — it's healthier for them to sleep later and then also wake up later."
Still, Urs remembers telling her son: "You need more sleep, you're forgetting things."
"I keep asking you, 'Did you submit this? Did you submit that?' You forget. And so it clearly shows your memory is affected," Urs remembers telling Amit.
But recently, her son surprised her. He said, "I remember when I had fries with Scooter Muttha."
The man known as Scooter Muttha is Amit's great-grandfather — Urs' grandfather — who died many years ago. Urs was raised by her grandparents, and the man remains a beloved figure in their family. Amit's point to his mother that day was, if he is so forgetful, why does he still vividly remember such a small moment: being 6 and sharing fries with Scooter Muttha at a Burger King in Bangalore?
Urs didn't know what to say. Memory is a mysterious thing.
In fact, this debate got Amit thinking: How does memory work? And Urs, an avid NPR listener, encouraged him to explore the question for NPR's annual Student Podcast Challenge.
Good thing she did, and he did. This year, some 1,500 students competed in the eighth year of the annual competition, and Amit's What Happens to Memories won the top prize.
The podcast
"There were entire weeks of my life I barely remember," so begins Amit's winning podcast. "What I ate for lunch last Monday, what assignments I turned in, what someone said to me in the hallway three Tuesdays ago."
As a busy 16-year-old, Amit says in the podcast, he was struck by how much of his daily life simply disappears from his memory. He was also intrigued by the moments that do last.
Like being 6 years old in a bright Burger King in India. "I'm sitting across from Scooter Muttha, as I fondly call my great-grandpa. He's 87. We are both wearing flimsy gold paper crowns and we're sharing a plate of french fries. Just two kings eating fast food."
An old photo captures the two kings, one at the beginning of his life, the other nearing the end of his. But Amit didn't know his father had taken the picture until he began working on his podcast.
This memory has outlasted so many others, Amit says, even though nothing really happens.
"I don't remember what we talked about, but I remember the salt on the fries, the energy of the room and the way his crown sat slightly crooked on his head." Amit says in the podcast that he started wondering, "Why does my brain let go of a math lecture from yesterday but hold onto a paper crown from a decade ago?"
In his seven-minute audio story, Amit offers a few different answers. "It turns out, memory isn't a filing cabinet. It's more like a construction site. And the foreman of that site is the amygdala."
It's during sleep that our brains clean up that construction site, saving some memories and throwing out others. So his mom was right: Without enough sleep, the cleaning crew can't do its job. It also doesn't help, Amit says, that teens often let phones muddy their memory-making.
"When we experience life through a screen, hunting for the right filter, the perfect caption, we experience it halfway: half-online, half-distracted, half-present. And emotion is exactly what gives memories a better chance of sticking."
As an example, Amit says in his podcast, he's spent time volunteering in a senior living community, and many of the people he's met there don't remember or talk about the big events of their lives. Instead they cherish memories of intense feeling. Like Amit's memory of being 6 in a Burger King and feeling loved unconditionally by his great-grandfather.
"Science can explain the neurons and the glymphatic system, but it doesn't fully explain why, years later, seeing an old man on the street makes me feel a sudden pang of warmth and loss. I don't just see a stranger. I see a flicker of a gold paper crown."
Amit says, since he finished the podcast, he's found his mom listening to it, by herself.
Urs tears up and says the podcast "makes me feel closer to my grandpa."
Maybe memories are more than just stored information, Amit says at the end of his podcast.
Maybe they're proof that something — or someone — really mattered.
Listen to Amit Biligiri's What Happens to Memories?
Edited by Steve Drummond.
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