Explicit Memories - Not what you think
Explicit Memories
Broadly, memories can be described as implicit or explicit.
So what are explicit memories? They are not what they seem…get your mind out of the gutter!
Explicit memories are also known as declarative memories and are memories that we can describe or speak about.
When most people think of memories, they think of memories of things that have happened in their life.
Memories of you first time riding a bike. Memories of the first kiss. Memories of you high school graduation. Memories of your wedding day. These are the memories that make up our lives. The memories that tell the story of our lives.
These are a type of explicit memories called episodic memories because they tell the ‘episodes of our lives’.
Imagine if you couldn’t remember the stories of your life. There have been documented cases of individuals who have impaired episodic memory A patient who had an unfortunate motorcycle accident with damage to the hippocampus (the part of the brain thought to contribute to storing episodic memories) couldn’t describe any events from anytime of his life despite being able to remember facts. He could look through a photo album and remember the people and the occasional place but he couldn’t remember anything about the events that happened in the photos (Rosenbaum et al., 2005). These cases show that our memories of events are stored very differently to those of facts and figures.
Speaking of facts and figures, have a think about all the knowledge you have. Imagine you were asked to display how good your memory was by showing all the things you have learned in your life time.
Chances are you listed things like that would make you a wizz at a quiz night or pub trivia. The winner of the 2015 AFL Grand Final. The tallest mountain the Australia. The capital of Germany. These are all also explicit memories. However, these are called semantic memories. These are memories of knowledge. Facts.
Can you imagine losing the ability to remember facts? Again, there are examples of people who have lost their semantic memory (called semantic dementia). One example is that a patient who saw a sheep couldn’t remember the word sheep. But it doesn’t necessarily stop at just the word. Another patient who saw a zebra, called it a horse but commented on how weird the stripes were. No only had she forgotten the word zebra but the whole concept of what a zebra was.
So explicit memories are those we can talk about including the memories about events as well as memories about facts.
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