You and I both have the ability to travel back in time… at least in our minds. For example, I can remember that last Monday, I was at my desk, writing a post about stomachless animals. You too have a seemingly endless catalogue of the whats, wheres and whens of your life.

This ability to remember the what, where and when of our past experiences is known as “episodic memory”. The term was first coined in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving, who thought that such memories depended on language and were unique to humans.

He was wrong. In 1998, Nicky Clayton from the University of Cambridge published the first of many seminal experiments with western scrub-jays, showing that they