system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Do we lose memories, or only the ability to access them?

For example, I can't recall what I did on a particular day one month ago. Is that information no longer available in the brain, or is it still hidden away in there?

When looking at people such as 'rain man', and others with a similar condition, they're able to recall nearly everything they read, the weather on any given day in the past, what they had for dinner June 3rd, 1983, etc. Do we all have that information somewhere inside of us? Do I know what I've eaten every single day of my life, but I'm just unable to recall it?
gpt
This question hinges on some hotly debated topics in memory research that try to define how and where memory representations are stored in the brain. There is no good, definite, or agreed upon answer to this at the present time. However, the simple answer to your question is that a loss of memory is usually a loss in ability to access that memory. I'll give you a scenario that is easy to relate to first, and then mention some published research. 

You are going to the grocery store, and you have five different item to buy that a friend, parent, or significant other asked you to pick up, and don't have a list or any way to contact them. If you remember the first three items perfectly, but don't quite remember the last two, do you give up and go home? You would most definitely walk around the store, hoping something would cue your memory and you would be able to buy what you need. You memory of the 'forgotten' items was not immediately accessible by free recall, but would be accessible with better cues. 

Events at the time of test/recall/recollection are very important in determining whether you will be able to produce a certain piece of information. There is a ton of research in this area. An interesting paper by Malthup (1995) that used a 'false fame' procedure created by Larry Jacoby. This procedure involves asking participants to read/pay attention to a list of made-up, non famous names. Then after some time (a day, a week etc.) bring those same people back into the lab and test them on a new list of names that contains some names from the previous list, some new nonfamous names, and some names of famous people. Then participants are asked to rate the fame of the names presented. Names that were studied from the previous session, although they are fictitious and not associated with any level of fame, are consistently rated as being more famous than fictitious names presented for the first time at test. Older individuals are reliably shown to be worse at this task (i.e. rate studied names as famous more often) than younger individuals. Malthup manipulated this task by specifically telling participants the three options for names they will see (i.e. famous name, new nonfamous names, and old nonfamous names). In this context older adults performed as well as younger adults. This is just one example of how memory for certain events can be thought of as 'lost' because they are simply inaccessible at the moment, or need to be probed, cued, accessed in a different way.