For those who believe there is only one form of memory and only one way to remember things, you’re mistaken. There must be several kinds of memory, some that are accessible to conscious recall and some that we cannot consciously access according to Eichenbaum and Cohen 2001 and the test they did to discover this.
Explicit and implicit memories are the two different classes of memory that suggest people can be changed by past experiences without having any awareness of those experiences. Explicit memory occurs when people consciously or intentionally retrieve past experiences, like when you say “I remember..”.
Implicit memory occurs when past experiences influence later behavior and performance, even though people are not trying to recollect them and are not aware that they are remembering them. In implicit memories they are not knowingly recalled, but their presence is implied by our actions. At the same time, not all implicit memory tell us what to do. Priming refers to an enhanced ability to think of a stimulus, such as a word or object, as a result of a recent exposure to the stimulus. One type of implicit memory is procedural memory, it refers to the gradual acquisition of skills as a result of practice, or knowing how to do things. Improving performance on a something you don't remember doing is an example, such as riding a bike or swimming. You can't describe how you do it, you just know how and you get better and better.
Semantic and episodic memories are two types of memory that conveys your personal past. Semantic memory is a network of associated facts and concepts that make up our general knowledge of the world, whereas episodic memory is the collect of past personal experiences that occurred at a particular time and place. Episodic memory is the only form of memory that allows us to participate in mental time travel per say and revisit events that have happened in the past. Someone with amnesia can usually revisit a period before they became amnesic but are unable to revisit time after. But, episodic memory can also allow us to travel forward in time. Episodic memory can aid in imagining the future and is a flexible structure that allows us to recombine components of past experiences in new ways so we can mentally try out different versions of what might happen. All these multiple forms of memories suggest that our brains are much more complex and in many different ways than we could imagine.
Works cited:
"Memory & the Brain - The Human Memory." Memory & the Brain - The Human Memory. http://www.humanmemory.net/brain.html Schacter, Daniel L., and Daniel Todd Gilbert. Introducing Psychology. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Worth, 2013. Print.