[s-shellfish]

Our ideas of memory come from our previous ideas of memory. It's much more malleable than you may have grown to understand.

It really is like bread crumbs when you have deal with things like information overload. There's that whole idea of a 'memory palace' that I like to think about before I go to sleep, because it gives me a structure to meditate on at the end of the day, the thoughts I want to retain and arrange in the ways I'm curious about retaining and arranging them.

A lot of the information we collect can appear ordered, but unless it's a rigorous order proven mathematically, there's no real way to prove anything about the efficiency of our memory. Some thoughts may be useful tomorrow and others may be useful 10 years from now.

So I think it's fun to give it a structure I remember and can travel into, because I chose how to organize it over a very long period of time.

But ultimately I think it depends on ways you are most comfortable thinking about information. My imagination tends to be very visual.