Endel Tulving

Endel Tulving is the psychologist who dismantled the warehouse. For most of the twentieth century, “memory” named a single store: information went in, sat on shelves, and was fetched on demand. Tulving broke the warehouse into rooms that obey different laws. Born in 1927 in Estonia, displaced by war at seventeen, he studied at Heidelberg and immigrated to Canada in 1949, earning a doctorate at Harvard in 1956 before spending his career at the University of Toronto. His 1972 distinction between semantic memory—the timeless store of general knowledge, impersonal and independent of the occasion of its acquisition—and episodic memory—the record of personally experienced events, tied to a particular time and place and to the self who lived them—is among the most consequential distinctions in the history of psychology, and has become the clearest available frame for understanding what large language models have and what they lack. His most dramatic evidence was a patient known only as