A San Jose teenager has taken the top prize in a national audio competition with a seven-minute story about why the human brain holds onto some moments and lets others slip away.
Amit Biligiri, a 16-year-old junior at Evergreen Valley High School in San Jose, Calif., won NPR's Student Podcast Challenge for his entry, What Happens to Memories? The contest, now in its eighth year, drew roughly 1,500 student competitors.
The project grew out of a familiar household argument. Amit stays up late, and his mother, Kalyani Urs, who often works late herself, has long pressed him to get more rest. Amit recalled telling her, "I'm not really sleepy," and then making a case that adolescent sleep cycles run a few hours behind those of adults. He argued that sleeping and waking later is actually healthier for teenagers, he told NPR Topics: National.
Urs was not persuaded. She told her son that he needs more sleep and that he forgets things, pointing to the assignments she constantly has to ask him about. "You need more sleep, you're forgetting things," she recalled telling him, according to NPR Topics: National.
Then Amit produced a counterexample that stopped the debate: a vivid recollection of sharing french fries with his great-grandfather at a Burger King in Bangalore when he was 6 years old. The family knew the man as Scooter Muttha. He was Urs' grandfather, and he died many years ago. Urs was raised by her grandparents, and he remains a cherished figure in the household.
If Amit was as forgetful as his mother claimed, he asked, why could he still picture such a small, ordinary moment so clearly? Urs had no ready answer. Memory, after all, is a mysterious thing.
The exchange left Amit with a question of his own about how memory functions. Urs, an avid NPR listener, urged him to pursue it for the network's annual Student Podcast Challenge.
In the podcast, Amit describes the Burger King scene in detail: he is seated across from Scooter Muttha, who was 87 at the time, and both are wearing flimsy gold paper crowns while sharing a plate of french fries. He calls it a moment of two kings eating fast food.
A photograph captured the pair — one at the start of his life, the other near the end of his. Amit did not know his father had taken the picture until he began work on the podcast.
The memory has endured even though, by Amit's account, almost nothing happened in it. He does not recall the conversation, but he remembers the salt on the fries, the energy of the room, and the way the crown sat slightly crooked on his great-grandfather's head. That contrast led him to ask why his brain discards a math lecture from the previous day yet preserves a paper crown from a decade earlier.
In the podcast, Amit offers several explanations. "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," he said, speaking to NPR Topics: National.
Sleep, he explains, is when the brain tidies that construction site, keeping certain memories and discarding others. That means his mother had a point: without sufficient rest, the cleanup crew cannot complete its work. He also notes that teenagers often allow phones to cloud the process of forming memories.
"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," he said, speaking to NPR Topics: National.
Amit draws on his own experience volunteering in a senior living community. Many of the residents he has met there do not dwell on the major milestones of their lives, he says. What they hold dear are moments charged with strong feeling — much like his own recollection of being 6 years old at a Burger King and feeling unconditionally loved by his great-grandfather.
He acknowledges the limits of scientific explanation. Neurons and the glymphatic system can be described, he says, but they do not fully account for why, years later, the sight of an old man on the street can bring a sudden pang of warmth and loss — a flicker of a gold paper crown rather than a stranger.
Since finishing the podcast, Amit has caught his mother listening to it on her own. Urs becomes emotional when she discusses it, saying the podcast "makes me feel closer to my grandpa," she told NPR Topics: National.
Amit closes his podcast with a reflection: perhaps memories amount to more than stored information. Perhaps they are evidence that something — or someone — truly mattered.
The episode was edited by Steve Drummond. Listeners can hear Amit Biligiri's What Happens to Memories? through NPR.
