I think it definitely works like RAM -- and that's a problem. It's open to influence. When I was 10, I burned my eyebrows nearly off in an "experiment gone wrong" and my memory of it was at the house we lived in a year later. I don't know how I got the memory of it in the wrong place, but I think the way I "refreshed" the memory gave me the confidence that it really happened the way I (wrongly) remembered.
