
You can picture the long-ago scene perfectly: The waiter opens your bottle of champagne with the familiar — yet always startling — pop. The bubbles tickle your nose as you sniff the effervescent liquid. You raise your glass as you look into the eyes of your spouse. You see pupils dilate as those eyes look at you in return. “Happy anniversary,” you say, “to the love of my life.” This is episodic memory in action.
Episodic memory allows you to mentally time-travel back to an episode of your life and relive it in vivid detail. You also use episodic memory to remember the name of someone you recently met at a party. It enables you to remember to take a detour because there is construction along your usual route. In fact, most of the time when you speak about “memory,” you are referring to episodic memory, which involves several parts of the brain.
The hippocampus is crucial for episodic memory
If you drew a line between your ears you would pass through the most critical structure for episodic memory. The hippocampus looks somewhat like a seahorse with a head, body, and tail. It is always turned on, recording thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations that arise from other regions of the brain. One part of the hippocampus binds these disparate aspects of experience into a coherent whole. Another part tags it with an index that will allow the memory to be retrieved minutes, hours, days, or years later.Learning and retrieving information: the frontal lobes

Frontal Lobes of the Human Brain
Trying to remember whether you learned that medical information from a Harvard Health Blog post or a supermarket tabloid? The frontal lobes also help you remember the source and context of information that you learn.
Providing context: the parietal lobes

Episodic memory: left brain versus right brain

Aspects of episodic memory decline in normal aging

- Because learning diminishes, information may need to be repeated a couple of times in order to get it into the hippocampus so it can be remembered.
- Because the search process slows, it may take more time or a hint or a cue to retrieve a memory.
- Because of the ability to judge source declines, it may be more common to experience trouble recalling where we learned information.
The post Want to travel back in time? Use episodic memory appeared first on Harvard Health Blog.
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