Semantic vs. Episodic Memory

Semantic memory is the store of general knowledge: vocabulary, facts, concepts, the meaning of “Tuesday,” the boiling point of water, that Paris is the capital of France. It is impersonal and timeless; you do not need to recall where or when you learned that whales are mammals in order to know that they are. Episodic memory is the record of personally experienced events, tied to a particular time and place and to the self who lived them. To retrieve an episodic memory is not to consult a fact but to re-experience a moment from your own past—to go there. Endel Tulving proposed this distinction in 1972, in a book chapter that seemed at first like an aside and turned out to swallow the field. His evidence was behavioral and clinical, culminating in the case of a patient known only as K.C., who after a motorcycle accident retained an almost entirely intact semantic memory—he knew facts about