Is Your Memory a Movie or a Summary? The Science Behind How We Recall the Past.

Remember

Expanded perspective

I had one of those strange, illuminating moments the other day. I was chatting with a close friend, laughing about a meeting we had both been in just hours before.

I recalled a specific moment, the exact, slightly odd phrase our manager used, the way the afternoon light hit the plant in the corner, and the collective, silent groan we shared over a bad pun.

My friend looked at me, blinked, and said, “I don’t remember any of that. I just remember we decided to move forward with the project.”

The difference was stark. It was as if I had watched a movie in full color, and they had just read the one-sentence summary on Wikipedia.

My immediate, unspoken thought was, Do they have a bad memory?

But that didn’t feel right. This friend is one of the sharpest people I know. This discrepancy sent me down a rabbit hole, and the answer I found was more profound than I could have imagined.

What I discovered is that the difference between our recollections isn’t a simple case of a “good” versus a “bad” memory.

Instead, we were demonstrating two fundamentally different, and equally valid, ways our brains are wired to process and store the past. It’s a distinction between two types of memory: episodic and semantic.

Episodic memory

It is what most of us think of as “memory.” It’s our personal highlight reel, the ability to remember the specific episodes of our lives. Scientists call it “mental time travel” because it’s defined by the feeling of re-experiencing a moment, the sights, the sounds, the emotions, the “what, where, and when.” My memory of the manager’s tone and the dusty plant was a classic episodic recall. It’s the system that builds the rich narrative of our lives.

Semantic memory

On the other hand, is our brain’s vast, efficient library of general knowledge. It’s knowing that a dog is a mammal or that Paris is in France. Crucially, this knowledge is disconnected from personal experience; you don’t have to mentally travel back to the classroom where you learned the fact to know it’s true. My friend’s memory, recalling the key decision but not the surrounding details, was a perfect example of a semantic memory. Their brain had expertly stored the core fact of the event but stripped away the rich, and perhaps non-essential, episodic context.

The difference

This difference isn’t an accident; it begins the moment we experience something. The way we pay attention and process an event, a stage called encoding, determines how the memory is built.

A person predisposed to detailed memory might be unconsciously engaging in a deeper, more emotional, and self-referential way of processing the world around them, creating a rich, movie-like memory.

Another person’s brain might be more efficiently wired to extract the gist, the core meaning, without getting bogged down in what it deems to be superfluous detail.

Final thoughts

So, the truly shocking part of my discovery was this: my friend’s memory wasn’t failing; it was succeeding in a different way.

Their brain was acting like a powerful data compressor, extracting the most critical information for future use.

Mine was acting like a high-fidelity archivist, preserving moments to build my personal story.

Neither is better nor worse; they are just different, equally adaptive cognitive styles that highlight the fascinating diversity of the human mind.

---

References:

Memory (Encoding, Storage, Retrieval) | Noba, accessed June 17, 2025, https://nobaproject.com/modules/memory-encoding-storage-retrieval
Memory (Encoding, Storage, Retrieval), accessed June 17, 2025, https://peachf.org/images/Science/MemEncodingStorageRetrievalMcDermott.pdf

7.5 Memory Processes: Encoding – Cognitive Psychology, accessed June 17, 2025, https://nmoer.pressbooks.pub/cognitivepsychology/chapter/three-processes-of-learning-and-memory/

How Memory Functions – Human Biology, accessed June 17, 2025, https://open.lib.umn.edu/humanbiology/chapter/1-10-how-memory-functions/

3 Types of Memory: What They Are & How They Form – BetterUp, accessed June 17, 2025, https://www.betterup.com/blog/types-of-memory