[Symmetry]

You heard that they said something though, right? Yes, you might not resolve the sound into words until after working at it but whether the brain promotes the stimulus to conscious awareness and saves it or if the activations fade should be entirely resolved within a few hundred milliseconds. The stimulus has to go superliminal to get into those circular buffers you're talking about, there aren't any buffers that big in subliminal processing.

[wahern]

You're probably right. I shouldn't draw too many conclusions from my perceived experiences. And consciousness is complex enough that I might not appreciate my awareness of the sounds, not to mention my awareness of the elapsed time.

Plus, it's hard to argue against what the research suggests about echoic memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoic_memory. Minutes is at least at least an order of magnitude greater than what's been shown.