Fuhgeddaboudit! Or maybe (and as many of us prefer) don’t. As it turns out, “episodic memory”—the ability to relive specific moments from past experiences—may be related to a person’s creative capacity.
“Memory is not just for going back into the past and reminiscing about what’s happened,” says Kenan Jr. professor of psychology Daniel Schacter. “It also plays a very important role in imagining the future and allowing us to think creatively.” Schacter has been studying how memory works and changes for decades. His lab group conducts cutting-edge research on a range of memory-related topics, from aging and memory to memory and problem solving. He is the author of the 2001 book The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, organized around the idea that errors in memory can be categorized into seven basic buckets: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence.
Schacter’s recent research has explored “episodic simulation”: how the brain constructs simulations of past and future events. In 1980s, while directing the Unit for Memory Disorders at the University of Toronto, he studied a remarkable patient by the name of Kent Cochrane (known as K.C). “Kent had a motorcycle accident [that] produced a severe head injury, resulting in one of the worst cases of amnesia that’s ever been recorded in the literature,” Schacter explains. This rendered him unable to recall personal past experiences. K.C.’s episodic memory was shattered. But his general knowledge (referred to formally as “semantic memory”) remained intact.
K.C. had another problem, too: he couldn’t plan for the future. When asked to imagine what he might do the next day, his mind went blank. “He couldn’t conjure up any episode of what he might do tomorrow,” Schacter recalls, suggesting a profound link between the human capacity to remember the past and envision the future.
This early insight became a cornerstone of Schacter’s subsequent research. By the mid-2000s, using advances in brain imaging technologies like functional MRI (fMRI), his lab began studying the relationship between memory- and imagination-related brain activity. In one seminal study, participants were given simple word cues and asked “to remember an experience from the past few years that was related to the cues” while their brain activity was scanned. The results were striking, says Schacter. Regions like the hippocampus, which plays an important role in episodic memory, were activated robustly—not only when participants remembered past events, but also when they imagined future ones.
This discovery led to the formulation of the “constructive episodic simulation hypothesis,” which posits that episodic memory’s primary purpose extends beyond retrospective reflection. Instead, memory can enable individuals to flexibly recombine details of past experiences to anticipate and plan for the future. This adaptive flexibility—critical for survival—also allows people to make decisions surrounding their future experiences and lives. However, “episodic memory is not there just to provide a passive recording of what happened to you…” Schacter explains. It’s “constructive” (as the title of his research hypothesis notes), and functions as an active process—occasionally making it prone to error, as pieces of the past are merged to inform ideas of future realities.
Schacter’s lab also uses other techniques to deepen this understanding. In one experiment, known as “episodic specificity induction,” participants were primed to recall vivid and detailed memories by watching a short video, and then asked to describe it at length. Those who underwent this induction imagined future scenarios with greater richness compared to those in control groups—suggesting that memory and imagination are, indeed, intertwined.
Crucially, the implications of these findings may extend beyond memory and imagination to the realm of creativity. Divergent creative thinking, which Schacter defines as the ability to generate new ideas by recombining information in novel ways, bears a striking resemblance to episodic future thinking. His lab tested this link in an experiment involving the “alternate uses task,” where participants were asked to generate innovative uses for everyday objects. When they underwent episodic specificity induction before this task, their creative output increased.
“In both of those cases, we saw that there was more activity in the hippocampus doing the future imagining or divergent creative thinking after…the episodic specificity induction than the control induction,” Schacter says. “So, putting that all together, we believe that there really is a role for episodic memory retrieval in imagination and creativity.”
But this flexibility entails trade-offs. The research reveals that individuals who excel at divergent creative thinking are also more prone to memory distortions. For instance, they’re likelier to mistakenly recall words they didn’t see in a memory task. “We have found in several experiments a link between…imagining the future and recombining information in a flexible way,” he says, “and [being] prone [to] making memory errors and memory distortions.”
As research continues to uncover the exact mechanisms between how the brain remembers and creates, one thing remains clear: memory is a fundamental part of thought itself. And, while all animals have some form of memory system, the capacity for advanced episodic memory may be related to humans’ ability to construct innovative solutions.