Humans are separated from nature and machine by the faculty of mind. Mind is that which observes the world from a perspective. This perspective is what enables cognition. Perspective is made possible by narrative.
The reduction of the complexity of observed phenomena to the level of memory is the acting goal of the human mind. It is not a static entity of computation learning from experience, but rather the dynamic filter that processes the world into a story.
Human memory has the geometry of concentric spheres of partial resolution, with the observer located at the center of those spheres. These spheres contain particular object classes, ranging from physical objects at the nearest and most detailed level to monsters and heroes at the levels of lowest resolution.
To move through the real environment is in itself an act of story for the human. Goals are created, and the various actors that stand between and in support of man and his goal reveal themselves. His action is informed and inhibited by these actors, and completion of even so simple a goal as finding a place to sit represents a minute but real metaphysical battle in the story of his memory.
Memory not only serves as a faculty for storage and recollection, but also compression. It is an organic multi-scale compression scheme. Events are aggregated by direction in these spheres. A sphere being a surface of an infinite number of points, the directions the observer may look in, and therefore the theoretical bound of memory, is infinite.
However the spacial density of the data being stored is not infinite. A paradox this is, in fact this is perhaps the most profound realization in nature of the Banach Tarski paradox, or the infinite nature of objects possessing finite detail.
The act of human memory is to look out from the center towards a particular event. As no memory is perfect, the holes in the first sphere of photographic detail will be filled by the sphere at the next object level, perhaps the character level, and so on until the whole of the picture is filled, some by real events, and some by the story that the observer has chosen those events should play a part in.
It is well known that memory can be altered, even reversed, by the subtle tickling of the photographic layer, perhaps by careful editing of a remembered image, or even verbal doubting of remembered detail. Since no memory is perfect, the observer will often defer to another observer, if that other portrays themselves as possessing a more complete recollection of the initial event.
Each time a story is told, those actors that lay behind the initial layer grow clearer; and, the human mind being forgetful as it is, chip away at the purest memory of an event, filling in the edges, and eventually all but the most starkly remembered detail, with their own fiction.
Social compulsion is by no means a small actor in this phenomena. Humans are after all self-doubting creatures. Crowd consensus holds a near totality of power over the individual, if that individual is not skilled in the art of narrative. Those who emerge as leaders in this collective effort of forgetfulness are those who can most closely match the observed events with their story.
It is not simply the photographed story that they must match, this layer is almost entirely superfluous to their success. No, it is the characters that inhabit these memories that they must match, or better yet create. Some storytellers are those who truly believe in the story, others use the story to distract from those photographed events they would rather were not part of the collective memory, but in either case, the process is the same.
It only matters then whether their efforts lead the collective memory closer to truth, or further therefrom.
This is the difficulty that greets every student of history. History, unlike the natural sciences, is beholden to the purposes and biases of its storytellers. The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt often rewrote their history to exalt their own grandeur, scratch out a lost battle, and even blot out the names of political enemies. They were by no means the last great empire to do so.
The modern orchestrators of social memory cannot do this as directly, for history is now preserved by more than written and spoken story. However, the technique is no less potent. If the actors they can animate within the social memory are powerful enough, that social memory, despite having access to in some cases the literal photographic detail, will rewrite itself at their behest, even to the point of ardent destruction of that physical detail.
All this is possible and unavoidable if the individual observers are weak storytellers.
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