For sure, but 'memory' as people think of it plays a fairly small role in chess - mostly relegated to opening preparation which is quite short term - watch any

For sure, but 'memory' as people think of it plays a fairly small role in chess - mostly relegated to opening preparation which is quite short term - watch any player, including Magnus, stream and they all constantly forget or mix up opening theory in various lines. But of course if you expect to play a e.g. Marshall Gambit in your next game then you'll review those lines shortly before your game. Instead people think players have this enormous cache of memorized positions in their minds where they know the optimal move, but it's more about lots of ideas and patterns, which then show themselves immediately when you look at a position. Watch any world class player solve puzzles and you'll find they have often solved it before 'you' (you being any person under master level) have even been able to figure out where all the pieces are. And it's not like they've ever seen the exact position before (at least not usually), but they've developed such an extreme intuition that the position just instantly reveals itself. So one could call this some sort of memory as I suspect you're doing here with 'lifelong memory', but I think intuition is a far more precise term.