Grasping the laws of logic is the most foundational and important requirement for having coherent thoughts, and a functioning memory is the second most foundational requirement. It is memory, along with a grasp of reason, that allows someone to build on thoughts that are not the immediate focus of their mind during a certain moment. Moreover, it is only for a small handful of phenomenological reasons that certain memories are kept, even if there are certainly other mental phenomena at play when it comes to other types of memories.
There are two primary reasons why one's memory preserves miscellaneous kinds of information when some degree of effort is involved. In many cases, a person remembers something other than sheer trivialities (such as what they remember eating earlier in a given week) either because they directly wish to remember it or because memorizing it is a necessity for their survival or lifestyle. Without willpower and necessity, the phenomenological landscape of memory would be drastically different.
The former is why people can remember extensive details about issues or things that they are interested in, even if those interests are very niche, unimportant, or foreign to the general populace. The latter is why people can remember something that they depend on in order to succeed in their jobs or in other practical pursuits even though they would otherwise not be concerned about the matter whatsoever. The vast majority of conscious attempts to memorize will fall into at least one of these categories.
Some memories of experiences or facts may accumulate without any direct, active effort, even if it is no accident that their contents were memorized. Other memories may be formed against a person's wishes, such as in the case of a pivotal but deeply traumatic experience. For at least a great deal of memories that are not phenomenologically formed in these ways, though, will and necessity are what dictate which things will be committed to memory and which things will be excluded.
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