ABSTRACT
Despite a long and vigorous history of research on human memory (Anderson & Bower, 1973), very little is known about how it actually works, and it is often treated as a mystery. This paper consists mainly of well-known results from psychology, biology, and computer science arranged in a way that appears to hang together. There are still many gaps, some of which get bridged with constructs of varying quality. For the sake of concreteness, we will be mostly concerned with visual memory and will present a fairly detailed distributed information-processing model of its function. In an effort to avoid both jargon and long explanations, I have come to adopt an informal conversational style often associated with content-free ramblings; bear with me.
