[trapperkeeper74]

What seems the most likely is that, effectively, memory is like very lossy, probabilistic compression spread with redundancy across a billion analog storage nodes, similar in some ways to a Bloom filter. It’s not binary though, it’s analog. After all, there’s no value in perfectly “unlearning” or destroying a specific memory, just “free” it up by gradual deemphasis of its parts and perhaps it may effectively go away.

Also, the interplay between short-term and long-term memory formation in order to make some approximation of the short-term memory (also an approximation) somewhat permanent.

Granted, recall is imperfect and different every each time.

[qplex]

>Granted, recall is imperfect and different every each time.

Still, one can memorize and recall some things with almost perfect accuracy (at least over time), for example phone numbers.