A closer look
For a long time, psychologists lumped all memory together in one bucket. Enter Endel Tulving in 1972, who brilliantly pointed out that remembering Paris is the capital of France is functionally entirely different from remembering the time you aggressively threw up near the Eiffel Tower. Tulving argued that episodic memory isn't just a data retrieval system; it's literal mental time travel. It grants humans the unique, frankly exhausting ability to project our consciousness backward to re-experience agonizingly awkward encounters from a decade ago, complete with fully simulated regret.
