A recent item in Science Daily (here) discusses work on how the hippocampus time-stamps memories.  

“Ironically, Gage and his team had not set out to explain how the brain stores temporal information. Instead they were interested in why adult brains continually spawn new brain cells in the dentate gyrus, the entryway to the hippocampus. The hippocampus, a small seahorse-shaped area of the brain, distributes memory to appropriate storage sections in the brain after readying the information for efficient recall… Each of these newborn neurons undergoes a prolonged maturation process, during which it changes from hyper-excitable to composed and reaches out to mature brain cells that are already well-connected within the established circuitry. Exercise, learning, and environmental enrichment increase proliferation and survival of new neurons, while pathological (chronic) stress and age send their numbers plummeting. Despite an increasing understanding of how new neurons become part of the existing dentate gyrus network, it is still unclear what their exact function is… It quickly became clear that overly excitable youngsters respond indiscriminately to incoming information… But nothing lasts forever. Even the most highly strung nerve cells that used to get excited by just about anything will eventually quiet down. As they mature into fully functional granule cells, they take their place in the existing circuitry while the next generation of newborn neurons takes their place firing away at new events.

Yet, independent events that had nothing in common but the fact that they occurred around the same time will now be connected forever in our minds—explaining why discussing the movie we saw a couple of months ago might bring back the name of the café we visited afterward but whose name has been eluding us.

“Current thinking holds that when we bring up a certain memory, it passes back to the dentate gyrus, which pulls all related bits of information from their offsite storage,” says Gage. “Our hypothesis suggests that cells that were easily excitable bystanders when the memory was formed are engaged as well, providing a hyperlink between all events that happened during their hyperactive youth.”

This would be the source of the life-long narrative that is our ‘life’.