In psychology, an episodic memory is a form of personal long-term memory involving personal events, including unique memories of people, times, places, and emotions of the related events. Unlike episodic memory, semantic memory is objective and generalized. Personal recollections of one’s life story form the core of an episodic memory, such as reminiscences about one’s former school, one’s comparatively recent birthdays, or the exact moment one absorbed some significant piece of information.
A prominent memory expert, Endel Tulving, considers episodic memory to be special because it enables the mental ‘time travel’ phenomenon of remembering events. This ability to mentally time travel helps people ponder about the past and it assists them consider and prepare for the future as well. Studies about the brain bestow the process of forming and recalling an episodic memory to the hippocampus and associated structures.
There are cases, such as amnesia or Alzheimer’s disease, in which people are able to retain memories but have damaged emotional attachments to them, recalling or deriving episodic memory functioning in some capacity. Although people feel as though they can ‘time travel’ to the moment of the memory, it is more likely to be reconstructed or less likely to be influenced at the same time. On the whole, episodic memory is pivotal to a person’s identity, social interactions, and the process of acquiring knowledge, as it allows them to tether specific memories to the present and future.