Well, it is your experience so there is not much I can say, except try to point out that if there was no memory function operating during your collapse you would not be able to recall your experience....so, logically, some aspect of the event must have been recorded in order for you to be able to remember the experience at all.
''Memory is typically modeled after perception. "Remembering" and "perceiving" are considered to be success terms because if one remembers an event, then the event happened; and if one perceives an object, then the object is accurately represented. Analogously, misremembering an event is similar to illusory perception—there is some perceptual information present, but it is being misrepresented. And then there are hallucinations, which are analogous to full confabulations because they are not simply misrepresentations but unconstrained mental fabrications in the absence of stimuli. Accordingly, misremembering and confabulating are forms of malfunctioning, the latter being worse. This analogy between perception and memory is straightforward, but it can’t be right for several reasons.
First, scientific evidence shows that this analogy cannot be the whole story. Memories are not retrieved from long-term memory always in the same way and with the exact same information. Rather, there is a constructive process that reconsolidates them at retrieval and storage (Lane et al., 2015). Procedural and implicit forms of memory are very accurate and allow us to do things like play tennis or ride a bicycle, but healthy individuals tend to systematically confabulate details about their personal lives. In fact, healthy patients systematically distort these personal memories—significantly more than patients with memory impairments like amnesia (Schacter et al., 1996). Unlike the perceptual case, memory distortion (at least concerning autobiographical memory) is not pathological or simply a malfunction, but it is very likely beneficial because the purpose of the memory system is not only to store information about past actions and events but also to make sense of the past in insightful ways.
''Memory is an important component of conscious experience, feeding its content with details about the past and personal meaning. Consciousness is not simply perceptual information maintained temporarily in working memory, although that does occupy a great deal of conscious experience. It is a collection of systems that work together to produce the useful, and sometimes not so useful, contents of awareness.''
''Recognition, in psychology, a form of remembering characterized by a feeling of familiarity when something previously experienced is again encountered; in such situations a correct response can be identified when presented but may not be reproduced in the absence of such a stimulus. Recognizing a familiar face without being able to recall the person’s name is a common example. Recognition seems to indicate selective retention and forgetting of certain elements of experience. Controlled tests of recognition have been used by experimental psychologists since the late 19th century to give insight into the processes of human memory. Compare recall.''
