Episode
What is memory for?
- Podcast
- Many Minds
- Published
- Nov 20, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 5045
- Processing state
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- https://manyminds.libsyn.com/what-is-memory-for
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Summary
Everyone loves a good evolutionary puzzle. Why do we have appendices? Why do we dream? Why do we blush? At first glance, memory would not seem to be in this category. It's clearly useful to remember stuff, after all—to know where to find food, to remember your mistakes so you don't repeat them, to recall who's friendly and who's fierce. In fact, though, certain aspects of memory—when you hold them up to the light—turn out to be quite puzzling indeed. My guests today are Dr. Ali Boyle and Dr. Johannes Mahr . Ali is a philosopher at the London School of Economics (LSE); Johannes is a philosopher at York University, in Toronto. Both have written extensively about the functions of memory, and, in particular, about the functions of episodic memory —that capacity for calling up specific events and experiences from our own lives. Here, Ali, Johannes and I lay out the textbook taxonomy of memory, and discuss how episodic memory has drawn the lion's share of philosophical interest. We pick apart the relationship between episodic memory and another major type of long-term memory, semantic memory . We sketch a range of different accounts of the evolved functions of episodic memory, including Johannes's proposal that episodic memory serves communication and Ali's proposal that it fuels semantic memory. And, finally, we consider what this all means for our understanding of memory in children and in animals. Along the way, we touch on Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, infantile amnesia, evidential systems in language, imagination, "simulationist" theories of episodic memory, what it feels like to remember, collective memory, the hippocampus, cryptomnesia, and the cow's digestive system as a metaphor for memory. If you're enjoying Many Minds, you might consider leaving us a ra…