What I find instead, is that by just processing novel information, especially if I focus on analysing it, my brain internalizes insights and builds model of that type of thing, allowing me to either imperfectly reconstruct what I've seen, or to come up with an infinite array of permutations, extrapolations, etc which is where the real ideas come from.
Further, ideas crucially revolve not around just the information itself, but the "feel" for what role they play in the whole, how well they do it, in what way they're notable, etc.
In fact I'd straight up claim that memorization is antithetical to creativity - a perfect ML autoencoder or GAN would just regurgitate the training data. Creativity comes from generalisation while memorisation is analogous to overfitting.