San Jose Student Wins NPR Podcast Challenge With Story on Memory

The podcast grew out of a recurring argument with his mother, Kalyani Urs. Biligiri often stayed up late, and Urs, who tends to work late, would ask why he was going to sleep so late. He told her that the sleep cycle for teenagers is delayed by a few hours, making it healthier for them to sleep later and wake up later. Urs remembered telling him that he needed more sleep and was forgetting things, and that she kept asking whether he had submitted assignments. He forgot, she said, showing his memory was affected.

Then Biligiri surprised her. He said he remembered eating fries with Scooter Muttha, his great-grandfather and Urs's grandfather, who died many years ago. Urs was raised by her grandparents, and the man remains a beloved family figure. Biligiri's point was that if he was so forgetful, why did he vividly recall being 6 years old and sharing fries with Scooter Muttha at a Burger King in Bangalore?

In the podcast, Biligiri describes that memory: sitting across from Scooter Muttha, then 87, both wearing flimsy gold paper crowns and sharing a plate of french fries. An old photo captures the two, one at the beginning of his life and the other nearing the end. Biligiri did not know his father had taken the picture until he began working on the podcast. He says he does not remember what they talked about, 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. He wondered why his brain let go of a math lecture from yesterday but held onto a paper crown from a decade ago.

The podcast offers several answers. Memory is not a filing cabinet, Biligiri says; it is more like a construction site, and the foreman is the amygdala. During sleep, the brain cleans up that site, saving some memories and throwing out others. His mother, he concludes, was right: without enough sleep, the cleaning crew cannot do its job. Phones also do not help, he says, because when people experience life through a screen, hunting for the right filter and caption, they experience it halfway, half-online, half-distracted, half-present. Emotion, he adds, gives memories a better chance of sticking.

Biligiri says he has volunteered in a senior living community, where many people he met did not remember or talk about the big events of their lives. Instead, they cherished memories of intense feeling. He compares that to his own 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, he says, but it does not fully explain why, years later, seeing an old man on the street makes him feel a sudden pang of warmth and loss. He does not just see a stranger; he sees a flicker of a gold paper crown.

Since finishing the podcast, Biligiri says he has found his mother listening to it by herself. Urs tears up and says the podcast makes her feel closer to her grandpa. At the end of his podcast, Biligiri says memories may be more than stored information. Maybe, he says, they are proof that something or someone really mattered.