If we remembered everything, he said, we would be completely inefficient because our brains would always be swamped with superfluous memories.
Yet there are a few people who, it has elsewhere been claimed, can remember details from every day of their life, on demand. What's 'superfluous' to one of us may be essential to others... a strictly subjective judgement. Some of us are specialists, others generalists.
The trouble with such reporting is that there's little science involved, and a whole lot of anecdotal reportage. Of course, our brains are enormously complex, having to operate in a wide diversity of human and chemical environments. Given the number of variables, solid memory science has yet to emerge ... in articles like this one, at least.