Heard a conversation on NPR with a memory expert. Apparently, memories are made in one part of the brain, but stored elsewhere. This is why some forms of brain trauma have different effects--like the movie Momento, where the new memories had no lasting power, and the hero kept waking up into new times and having to deduce what was going on. The storage facility was damaged.
This also explains why Alzheimer's patients can remember their more distant past, but not their more recent lives--the memories are literally* stored in different places.
*N.B.: I am using the word "literally" literally, and not figuratively or as an intensifier. This is one of my pet grammatical peeves. That and repetition of "self," as in "I self-analyzed myself." As opposed to, say, self-analyzing someone else?
According to this expert, one of the reasons sleep is so important to humans is that the brain uses sleep time to sort memories and store them their different locations. Sleep deprivation also impinges on the ability to remember.
Of course, the image that popped into my head was the brain as a "memory librarian," using the hours the library is closed to reshelve the books. Can't you just see it pushing around a metal cart of jumbled images and filing them according to the Dewey Decimal System?
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