If memories are just a side effect of where certain chemicals flow along pathways, then along the lines of your comment... A river is like a memory: water gene

If memories are just a side effect of where certain chemicals flow along pathways, then along the lines of your comment... A river is like a memory: water generally flows the same way down them, some days stronger some days drier, and the more they are used, the more they shift their course. Memory is just a word for the human experience of localized state. There is a universal state that we experience a small piece of as we live. Though our experience of it ceases when we die, the state of the universe continues its natural course, with no loss of continuity, just a phase shift. The experience of human life is like a river. At first we are small mountain trickles, barely aware of our existence. As we make our way through the middle of our lives, we are self-important rivers, providing an ecosystem to those around us, sometimes with others flowing their experience into ours, and sometimes as we give our experience to others; some amount evaporating to who knows where and some amount being replenished by rains, growing ever larger. Towards the end, we either become stuck in lakes, or we are like large idle bays, full of experience, most of us moving now with less fundamental "purpose." Lake or bay, eventually we disperse back to the ocean of existence.