Endel Tulving

In this course

Tulving's distinction between semantic and episodic memory, and especially his concept of autonoetic awareness (the ability to mentally travel through time and re-experience past events), grounds the course's examination of how memory—both individual and collective—functions as a substrate for identity and reality. In the Mandela Effect reading, Tulving's work enables the argument that false or altered memories aren't merely storage errors but phenomenologically real re-experiences, suggesting that manipulating what we remember changes the neurological and temporal architecture of consciousness itself. His framework allows the seminar to think through how AI systems that process, store, and generate information might similarly reshape the experiential relationship between past, present, and future.

Background

Endel Tulving was an Estonian-born Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. In his research on human memory he proposed the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. Tulving was a professor at the University of Toronto. He joined the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest Health Sciences in 1992 as the first Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and remained there until his retirement in 2010. In 2006, he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC), Canada's highest civilian honour. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 36th most cited psychologist of the 20th century

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