Semantic memory is basically retrieving some facts/information without remembering its context, when we learned it, how we were feeling when we learned that particular information, what time it was, with whom we were talking while learning it, etc. Episodic memory, on the other hand, is the retrieval of some events along with their contexts.

The anterior temporal lobe is mainly associated with semantic memory and language, and it acts as a semantic hub. While reading and learning about these, I began to question the distinction between semantic memory and language. Because when I think about language and the words that I have written until now, I don’t remember any of the context: when I first heard these words, what I was feeling at those times, when I first used these words in my conversations, who I was speaking with at that time, etc.

From my point of view, this happens because of the mathematics underlying how neurons are wired and activated. In our lifetime, we have heard the fact that Paris is the capital of France many many times in totally different contexts. My intuition is that the more these contexts are irrelevant to each other and the less they share common patterns, the less likely it is that the representations/patterns of “Paris” in our brain are strongly associated with any of those contexts. And since we hear this fact (“Paris being the capital of France”) many times in our lifetime, the connections that represent only this fact in our brains become stronger while the patterns that represent the context when we first learned this fact become weaker and weaker.

Similarly, when we hear the word "tree", for example, the patterns associated with the concept of a tree that are stored across different brain regions are activated and integrated by the anterior temporal lobe. By using these accumulated patterns, a coherent conceptual representation of a tree is reconstructed in our mind. As a result, we might end up imagining some representation of a tree without remembering the first time we ever saw a tree or the first time we heard the word "tree" because the connections that represent these contexts were not activated strongly or preserved sufficiently in our lifetime. The original experiences through which we learned the concept may be forgotten because of this reason, but the semantic knowledge remains because the connections that represent this semantic knowledge are activated enough (and usually under very different contexts).

To be able to remember the whole context of some specific memory, the sequence of events that results in that memory should be stored in the brain and the representation/pattern in each step should be strong enough together in the lifetime so that the sequence of patterns can be preserved and if the person recalls a specific portion of that sequence, the rest of the sequence can be activated again.

When I look at from this perspective, I think this might be a good definition of semantic memory: exposing some specific event/information many times under different conditions/contexts, or under one very rare and unimportant condition. It is also strange to see the destiny of a person who tries to be the best at everything and ends up being nothing in this mechanism, because the more different and diverse fields we focus on, the less likely and the more difficult it becomes for us to remember the details of any of these fields.