New Study Throws a Wrench in Our Understanding of Memory

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SStudying the inner workings of the human mind is always a thorny undertaking, and the models of how our brains work are continually re-examined, revised, and reconfigured. While neurologists have mapped which regions of the brain are responsible for different functions, things get fuzzier when we move into the realm of nebulous phenomena like memory.

Traditionally, explicit long-term memory (the intentional, conscious remembering of things and experiences) is divided into two subcategories: episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory, as its name suggests, is the memory of experiences: places, times and the emotions associated with them. Semantic memory, on the other hand, is the memorization of facts and general information.

To put it simply, you rely on semantic memory to win a bar trivia game, but you rely on episodic memory when you tell the story of your victory to your friends. Or at least that’s what psychologists believed. New research from the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham and the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge published this week in Human behavior blurs the lines between the two.

Read more: »Your memories are like paintings»

To study the retrieval and processing of information associated with semantic and episodic memory, researchers asked 40 people to remember associations between logos and brand names which corresponded either to their actual knowledge (for the semantic part), or to that which they had learned during a first phase of study (for the episodic part). While recalling the pairings, the subjects were scanned with functional MRI (fMRI), which shows relative blood flow to different areas of the brain to indicate neuronal activity.

Interestingly, the researchers found no real difference in brain activity during the two tasks. “We were very surprised by the results of this study, because a long-standing research tradition suggested that there would be differences in brain activity with episodic and semantic retrieval,” explained study author Roni Tibon in a statement. “But when we used neuroimaging to study this alongside the task-based study, we found that the distinction did not exist and that there is considerable overlap in the brain regions involved in semantic and episodic retrieval.”

In other words, the same parts of the brain are involved in these two distinct forms of memory retrieval, suggesting that they might be more connected than previously thought. Still, fMRI studies have come under increased scrutiny lately (who can forget the infamous dead salmon experiment?), and these results will certainly merit a second look. In the meantime, the study authors hope their results will provide new insights into memory disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

“These findings could help to better understand diseases like dementia, as we can begin to see that the whole brain is involved in different types of memory, so interventions could be developed to support this view,” Tibon said.

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Main image: Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

• Jake Currie

  Published on January 28, 2026

  Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.