Survival of Memory

I am wondering if extended secodary memory in fact resides outside the body. If memory were not resident within each of us but instead was the result of a communication between this external memory and ourselves, memories could survive. As to accidents and disease causing memory loss, this could simply be an impairment of the neural mechanisms which normally process this interdimensional information. The memories and so on are not lost, they simply becomce inaccessible.

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Anomalous Phenomena is Unexplained not Impossible
Psi is Subtle not Absolute
Anything is possible, it's all a matter of Probability

Good idea Phenominvestigator, but difficult to prove I suspect.

This reminds me actually of some friends of mine who have recently been to see Derek (of Most Haunted fame) doing his medium stage show.  I got discussing exacty how accurate the comments mediums come out with are.  If they are communicating with someone, instead of saying something along the lines of  "I have a name here,  his name begins with J, maybe John.  He's in a uniform"

Why don't we get "I have John Butler here, he wants to speak to Judith Butler his neice sitting five rows back on seat 68G.  He's still in his RAF Flight Lt Uniform and he says he was stationed at ......serial number.....NI number......DOB  etc".  If the memories are there and they are accessible what is stopping this type of communication.

Does it all depend on the medium?  How exactly do they communicate with the dead?

 Phenom has a point; it's been generally assumed amongst psychologists that information in the long-term memory that is 'lost', say, when you're old, it's not due to decay, just a failure to retrieve the information from the store. Additionally there's lots of types of memory, for example episodic (memories of your life events) and procedural (how to make a cup of tea/ ride a bike etc) to name but two. Moreover they tend to be located in different bits of the brain, so a very specific area can be responsible for very specific things. 

In terms of "I have john butler etc" well, perhaps the spirit DOES remember, just the medium is on a crackly phone line, so to speak, which is the impression i get when talking to people with those sorts of skills. It's not exactly a voice in the ear, but an intuition?   

Proving, in a quantitative sense, communications with the deceased is very difficult even in laboratory conditions. There are at least three alternative explanations, only one of which is After-Death Communications (ADC), putting aside fraud for the moment. What we have been able to prove in research parapsychology is "anomalous information transfer." Put simply, this is the notion that some people know things they simply should not. The research is now shifting from "proof oriented" to "process oriented", since this is the only way that there seems to be a chance of someday discovering how this process actually works. I believe we are generations away from 'proving' this in any way.

Based on mediumship research, I am finding that facts quickly fade while general information in the form of impressions seems to linger. So factual points are more difficult to recover. I suppose skeptics might claim that this is highly convenient, but what if this is indeed the case? Have we really established either position to the exclusion of the other?

As far as the "I have John... here" example, this illustrates a key point: not everything is recallable - this is even true in the physical example. Consider that there are many cases where elderly people recall memories long forgotten. Better said, perhaps put aside as other memories are more crucial in the interval. When these memories' importance subsides, it appears as if the old memories can return intact in some cases. Perhaps a similar function is at work in the sensitive example. Were this true, we should not expect perfection by any means; and this is precisely what we observe.

Anomalous Phenomena is Unexplained not Impossible
Psi is Subtle not Absolute
Anything is possible, it'a all a matter of Probability

If you talk with someone who loses their memory in old age what you find is that their main problem is the ability to convert short term to new long term memories. They know how to make a cup of tea but can't remember where they left the teapot. They remember someone they knew as a child but not who the current prime minister is.

In addition, they will confabulate a lot. This involves inventing stories to explain what they can currently see. So, they may wake up in hospital and be convinced they came because of their leg, simply because it aches slightly. In fact, they may be in hospital for something quite different. Tell them the truth and they will accept it. Then the next day they wake up convinced they are in hospital for their leg!

The odd thing with mediumship is that alleged spirits often 'remember' things that they were not that concerned about in life while forgetting really significant stuff. I've always found this peculiar.
The lab research on ESP shows a very small overall bias in favour of its existence. Even if this is correct and it is disputed, this may be quite irrelevant to alleged contact with the dead.

Incidentally, what is "extended secodary memory"? It sounds more like a computer hardware term than neuroscience.