You know your birthday. You know how to ride a bike. But one memory you can describe in words — the other only shows up in motion. Drag the slider to see how different memories leave different traces in your brain.
Explicit memory is what you can consciously retrieve and state in words. It splits into two types: episodic memory holds your personal experiences — your last birthday, yesterday's conversation, the smell of your grandmother's kitchen. Semantic memory stores general facts and knowledge: Paris is the capital of France, photosynthesis requires light, the Pythagorean theorem. Both can be declared, tested with direct questions, and impaired by damage to the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe structures.
You possess two fundamentally different memory systems: explicit memory (consciously retrieved and declared) and implicit memory (expressed through performance, not words).