The mind remembers what the brain decides to store and retrieve

There is an interesting article on the Scientific American website by Robert Stickgold and Jeffrey M. Ellenbogen titled "Sleep on It: How Snoozing Makes You Smarter". As the title indicates, it reviews evidence that sleep has an important role in cognition and memory. I quote an early paragraph that makes a fundamental point:

it helps to review a few memory basics. When we “encode” information in our brain, the newly minted memory is actually just beginning a long journey during which it will be stabilized, enhanced and qualitatively altered, until it bears only faint resemblance to its original form. Over the first few hours, a memory can become more stable, resistant to interference from competing memories. But over longer periods, the brain seems to decide what is important to remember and what is not—and a detailed memory evolves into something more like a story.

Comment: It is important to remember that the mind has an inflated idea of its own accuracy, and that what we remember is at best only a part of what we perceived, and that probably modified; at worst........JAD