loose thoughts on memory

You could think of perception as pattern matching. Matching patterns of mental states against other patterns of mental states. For example, perceiving a banana could be viewed as matching the 'live' perception of the banana on your senses against the stored perceptions in your memory. Without your memories you wouldn't, from your own perspective, be perceiving a banana, you would be perceiving something unknown, and you would be formulating a new memory for which you could later fill in the name 'banana'.

(nb: parallelism in pattern matching 'schemes', and fuzziness of pattern matching. Explore methods of pattern matching.)

It is quite easy to divide perceptions into live perceptions and stored perceptions. Live perceptions are perceptions that are currently being perceived, that are immediate, arriving through the senses directly. Stored perceptions are those that have been perceived and remembered, and are accessible for remembering again.

(nb: continuum between 'live' and 'stored', also stored perceptions can be viewed as budding off new live perceptions every time they are accessed/perceived again, leading to an expanding, evolving tree of memory.)

If perception is viewed as pattern matching, as matching patterns of mental states against other patterns of mental states, then combining that with the division of perceptions outlined in the previous paragraph, 3 obvious combinations become apparent.
We can pattern match between immediate perceptions, a sort of 'on-the-go' perception, we can tell that one animal in view is of the same kind as another animal in view, or that there are two similar forks side by side on the table.
We can pattern match between immediate and stored perceptions, ie, the fork on the table looks like a remembered fork.
And finally, we can pattern match entirely with the realm of stored perceptions, we can imagine various items of cutlery entirely with our mind's eye.
We can imagine complicated dancing patterns of this kind of pattern matching going on in our every day perceptions, and analysing these dances can shed a lot of light on the way our consciousness could work, as well as providing a neat framework against which consciousness could arise out of basic sensory mechanisms.