People sometimes ask me why I decided to study memory of all things. The short answer is: because it is the one cognitive faculty that most obviously makes us us. Strip away episodic memory and you strip away personal identity, continuity, relationships — almost everything that feels worth preserving.
The longer answer involves an undergraduate seminar on the famous patient H.M., who had most of his hippocampus surgically removed in 1953 and could no longer form new long-term memories. He woke every morning with no recollection of the previous day, yet retained skills, preferences, and a stable personality. This dissociation — between knowing that and knowing how, between episodic and procedural memory — still strikes me as one of the most profound empirical discoveries in the history of psychology.
Memory is not a filing cabinet. It is a constructive, fallible, social process — and that is precisely what makes it interesting.
My current work sits at the intersection of computational modelling and behavioural experiment. I try to build minimal models of how memory representations change over time and to test predictions of those models against human data. It is slow work. Hypotheses fail more often than they succeed. But every now and then an experiment comes back and the data look exactly as the model predicted, and I remember why I started.
If any of this resonates with you, feel free to get in touch.