Each of our memories was delicately etched into its own plate, catalogued and filed faithfully by the temperate brain, and barring violence, could be retrieved like a jukebox song by pushing the right buttons. Yet, a close scrutiny of Penfield's raw transcripts of his probing experiments shows memory to be a less mechanical process. These scripts tell of dreamlike glimpses, rather than disorienting reruns dredged up from the basement cubbyholes of the mind's archives. The owners of these experiences recognize them as fragmentary semimemories. The replays should have fooled nobody.
Human memories do crash.
They crash in peculiar ways, by forgetting vegetables on a list of things to buy at the grocery or by forgetting vegetables in general. Memories often bruise in tandem with a physical bruise of the brain, so we must expect that some memory is bound in time and space to some degree, since being bound to time and space is one definition of being real. Memory, then, must organize itself in some way to accommodate more possible thoughts than it has room to store. It cannot have a shelf for every thought of the past, nor a place reserved for every potential thought of the future. I remember a night in Taiwan twenty years ago.