Endel Tulving's passing makes me reflect on how much our clinical practice has been shaped by discoveries from cognitive neuroscience. Tulving's distinction between semantic and episodic memory is one I use often with patients and families (not using that jargon, of course). That these different faculties that we group together as "memory" are actually dissociable helps us to explain phenomena that can be puzzling or even exasperating. ("How come he can remember how to disassemble a car engine but can't remember what I ask him to get at the store?") Diagnostically, of course, we use the distinction to separate cases of Alzheimer's disease from another fascinating disorder, semantic dementia, in which episodic memory is relatively preserved but people lose semantic knowledge about the world. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/27/science/endel-tulving-dead.html