Memory in Tristram Shandy

In what ways do we (or don't we) see memory at work in Tristram Shandy?

"We can manipulate such information in ways that make it possible to bring it together or separate it in a variety of ways, to collate, classify, compose, and sort it in order to create new ideas or deconstruct old ones."

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;----they are the life, the soul of reading;----take them out of this book for instance,-----you might as well take the book along with them..." (52, Shandy)

When reading Tristram Shandy, it becomes hard to always follow along with what Tristram is discussing, because he goes from one idea to the other so fast. There will be moments when I'm reading  that I'll be following along with, like when he's talking about his father and uncle Toby, and then the next thing I know he's on a totally different train of thought, and I don't even realize that it's happened. We did that exercise in class on Thursday where we wrote down all the thoughts that came to our mind, and that's what the quote from The Book of Memory reminds me off.

As Tristram says, "digressions...are the sunshine;----they are the life, the soul of reading;----take them out of this book for instance,-----you might as well take the book along with them." This is true; if we were to take out all of his distractions from the book, there would be little left, but I think this novel functions like his memory. One minute he'll be writing his story, and then something he's written will make him thing of something else, and he'll go off on this tangent about that thing, and then something else will come about from what he just said, and so on. Then he'll realize he got way off topic and he'll go back to the idea, only to complete the process again. It's a pain to read, and at times a little excessive, but I think it does make it a bit more realistic when looking into his head.