Moved to counterparts.ai
The Memory Field Guide
A language model is brilliant, and it forgets everything the moment you close the tab.
Its context window is working memory — a fixed buffer where thinking happens. When the conversation ends, it’s gone. In human terms that’s severe anterograde amnesia: intact intelligence, no ability to form a lasting memory. Solving it means borrowing from the one system that already did — the brain. This is a guide to how memory actually works, how AI is trying to copy it, and where the ground is still open.
The Memory Field Guide now lives at counterparts.ai counterparts.ai/ecosystemIt’s being expanded there into a page per mechanism. This page stays as a pointer.
What’s inside
Eleven mechanisms
Each one read four ways: how the brain does it, the model that formalizes it, how AI implements or fails it, and the map of patents, papers, and open-source systems that have claimed it.
- Encoding & salience
- Consolidation
- Decay & forgetting
- Interference
- Retrieval & strengthening
- Reconsolidation
- Episodic ↔ semantic
- Emotional modulation
- Prospective memory
- Temporal context & association
- Schema & assimilation
LAB-002 · first published here, July 2026