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← Glossary

Source memory

Memory for where or when you learned something — separable from the fact itself.

You can know that coffee comes from Ethiopia without remembering whether you learned that at school, from a book, or from a conversation last week. The first is semantic memory; the second is source memory.

Source memory is sometimes selectively weakened in aphantasia and SDAM — facts survive, but the circumstances of acquiring them do not. Practically, this is why keeping a note of where you read something matters more than it does for some other people.