Well, we know that it's impossible to remember everything. Humans are absolutely terrible at accurately recalling things that they observed even a few minutes in the past.

But we also can't remember nothing and just dump _everything_ into the second brain, otherwise we'd have no map, no context, no way to even know how to look for what we need in the moment. It would be like taking a random teenager off the street, handing them an electronics engineering textbook, and asking them to build a power supply on the spot.

So there is definitely a spectrum. Everyone seems to disagree on the optimal point on the spectrum and that is almost certainly because it varies greatly from person to person.

My personal experience has been that simply writing extremely detailed notes in the first place makes the information "sticky" in my brain, and greatly increases the likelihood that I won't even _need_ to directly reference the notes in the future. Fun little catch-22 there.