Yeah. The fact that their skill increases with repetition indicates that, despite their inability to recall their past experiences/memories of performing this skill, their brains "remember" somewhere way deep in the unconscious layers of the brain, and allow the person to become better at it. If nothing remained in the brain, they wouldn't get better.



I'm not saying our brains retain every tiny little detail in infinite resolution of every moment in our lives. What I'm saying is that if repetition increases our ability to remember something, then at least SOME impression of that thing MUST have been left on our (sub/unconscious) brains every time we hear/experience it. Otherwise, our ability to remember these things wouldn't increase. Every new time we heard it, it would be as if we'd heard for the first time.

Unless you're saying that some of those repetitions simply fail to enter our brains and it's a matter of chance which ones randomly do end up staying? I doubt it, because the number of repetitions for any given subject (e.g., new words, songs, images, etc etc) tends to be fairly consistent. But I don't think that's what you're saying.

I would conjecture that whether or not our brain remembers something is determined primarily by how important we consider it and how long ago it happened Things that were completely unnoticed the first time around will not be recalled later.
Most memories become obscure, but repetition will extend them. Basically...
More repetition -> more memory
More time -> less memory
Eventually, I would think, memories become lost forever. So yes, initially everything will be there, but much of it fades.

A lot of the higher-end stuff of this can be described with simple psychology...

Also your brain actually stores a lot more than you realize. Every time you look at anything, whether it be a shape or simple object, your brain is associating it with something you've seen in the past. I've heard of a man who was blinded as a small child and had an operation to restore his vision. His eyes work properly, but he can hardly see or recognize anything except, as he said, brightly colored flowers because he has no memory of any visual information.
...And apparently when under hypnosis you can remember a lot of minute details of some event you've witnessed (they tested it on Mythbusters, too.) The information must be there, just not (easily) accessable.
I like to think that remembering things is also just association. I have trouble remembering things just arbitrarily, but if my current thoughts or conversation is of a similar context or subject, I can remember it almost fully.

Also you can relate it with computers.
In Psychology I was taught that there are three "memories": the sensory, short term, and long term. Sensory to me is like registers in the CPU. It is ever-changing and doesn't stay around at all. short-term would be like the RAM. It is there temporarily, but is easily gone and can only hold little information. long-term is like a harddrive. It's going to be there indefinitely (and files can get lost when they are buried deep in some directory somewhere. >.> <.<)
Then you have the various cerebral lobes that serve general purposes, just like the computer has various chips and circuit boards to serve general purposes. I'd list some, but I'm too tired right now to remember some of the lobe names.
... And you can segfault it. lolol (Sorry, I'm just getting more and more tired... I think I had more to say, but I can't remember.)

I really want to study psychology and try and make these sort of links with the human brain and technology to try and make some sort of AI. That'd be fun.