A typical v1 who has mastered the shruti by rote keeps about 2-3 MB of data in his brain and if he’s a higher shrauta ritualist retrieves it at random and performs several operations on the fly on it. A great ayya sAmavedin shrauta ritualist who once lived in vArANasi could be seen as having maybe 4-5 MB.
Why I mention these because they give us some kind of bounds on what is typically remembered by intelligent human.(5) Alan Turing, in many ways, saw ahead of his times and, in a sense, even with premodern computing, imagined things like AI of today. I heard that he believed that AI resembling human intelligence would emerge with a memory of around 2MB.
Instead, our AIs are currently based off huge data centers. This makes one wonder if we are missing something fundamental with respect to natural neural networks in these iterations.
Structure
In computer terms, what you are positing is that there is a basic storage of hard written memory – the hard drive. This is probably written in the form of protein modifications in neurons. This then goes into something like RAM, which is the second memory you allude to and that is like more in the form neural signaling