Charles Fernyhough

“This is part of what makes us distinctively human: the fact that, without any external stimulation, a man in an empty room can make himself laugh or cry.”
― Charles Fernyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves

“Memory means different things to psychologists. Autobiographical memory is an interesting case because it straddles the most basic of the distinctions that scientists make between types of memory: that between semantic memory (memory for facts) and episodic memory (memory for events). Our memory for the events of our own lives involves the integration of details of what happened (episodic memory) with long-term knowledge about the facts of our lives (a kind of autobiographical semantic memory). Another important distinction is that between explicit or declarative memory (in which the contents of memory are accessible to consciousness) and implicit or non-declarative memory (which is unconscious). As we will see, this distinction is particularly important when it comes to the question of how memory is affected by trauma and extreme emotion.”
― Charles Fernyhough, Pieces of Light: How the New Science of Memory Illuminates the Stories We Tell About Our Pasts