[the_duke]

Lossy compression combined with abstraction mechanism might be more a more appropriate way to describe it.

What gets processed and enters consciousness only a small percentage of the actual raw input from sensory "devices".

What get's stored is even less than that, is highly inaccurate and degrades quickly.

Abstraction comes in at finding patterns in the lossy data, and filling in the gaps in the data to form a coherent perception/memory.

[digi_owl]

My take is some kind of deduplication. Similar input gets overlayed, while novel inputs gets a new "slot". Thus we remember more about our childhoods because they are filled with novel experiences, while as we grow older time seems to fly because one day merge with all the others.