I don't know why every scientist in the world doesn't stop what they're doing and figure out what the memory is, or at least contrive some useful everyday terminology for describing it.

Memory: It's like a picture in your head, but it's not a picture and it's not in your head. It's sensorial, you see/hear/smell/taste/feel it, but it's not really sensorial and you don't actually see/hear/smell/taste/feel it. It proves the world outside of you is real, but proves it to only you. You know it's different from imagination, but you don't know what the differences are. What you know about your memories is that they're basically the only aspects of the world that are truly true, and you know for sure-sure that your memories might be wrong. 

Validating my over-reliance on the finding that a brain doesn't know the difference between doing something, imagining doing that thing, and remembering doing that thing- all the same parts of the brain "light up" during an FMRI scan, even in the motor cortex- the American Museum of Natural History included near the entrance to its special exhibition on the brain three (totally-the-same-looking) scan maps of brains doing, imagining, and remembering in illustration of that very finding, opening their exhibition with an acknowledgement and an impetus: something is wrong here, with our technology for visualizing brain electricity, or with the whole concept of doing as opposed to not doing. Here are plainly obvious visual representations of experimental results mashing real and imaginary, past and present, with a hyper-relevant conclusion hanging somewhere between poetry and outer space, you may now proceed to the next exhibit.

That our knowledge of how memory does what it does be bound up in abstruse and contested academic understandings is not an apt basis for human advancement. Memory doesn't seem to be a binary tool and it's not necessary to our understanding of memory to compare its crude employment to, for example, a monkey using the internet without knowing what makes the internet work. Yes, we use memory without knowing how it works. Also, we use memory without knowing even how we are using it. Maybe we are using the memory function of the brain incorrectly.  Maybe we're trying to marquee with the magic wand. Maybe looking at a visual representation of the electrical activity in a person's brain to surmise what they're thinking is as useful as phrenology. Maybe our brains are so unsophisticated they don't know the difference between doing something and not doing it. Maybe we could experience a different kind of thinking- that is, a different kind of doing.