Human neural pathways are coerced or enforced to solidify memories, but that doesn't guarantee that they are pertinent and persistent every time when needed.

These pathways fade out and most times, when required, fail to stay consistent with the previous knowledge or experience.

This is a clear example of why you are less likely to remember all the books you have read when asked, but rather know when you have read a book when the book's title pops up.

This is great insight for asking questions. How then do you structure your questions to suit a situation where you demand less vague opinions? Questions that would require some neural pathways to fire again, but have them recall instances with pathways that are independent but somehow activate the desired pathways.

E.g. You would want to know the scoreline from a particular match about a month ago. Recalling that would somehow be difficult because you are being required to fire a particular pathway that had stored the scoreline in your head for a particular time period.

So in this instance, it is better to call out if a player the person liked or made prominence in that match had scored a goal or contributed something meaningful. If the said player performance was so spectacular to remember, the person would more likely know the scoreline by levels of inference. That guy did this and that and that would mean (activating the memory pathway that stored the scoreline in the match) this was the scoreline of the match.

This approach would greatly improve how people remember things and how they are going to be enforced in the mind later on. This is all an assumption and would hope that this generally holds any significant value to the Neurosciences.

References:

• Vsauce