First of all, although I definitely agree that there is an immediate level of distortion that occurs even as you're experiencing something, I think that the most significant alterations to our memories occur later, as we examine and re-examine them. So if those original memories remain buried somewhere in the mind, it seems likely that they would be significantly less distorted than the picked-over, reprocessed memories.

Secondly, isn't it possible to register (and hence remember) experiences below the conscious level? I don't have any background in this, but I thought that, for example, under hypnosis people demonstrated an ability to remember things that they did not consciously take in. I'm not talking about so-called repressed memories, but memories of small details that just never made it to the front of the brain.

With that in mind, wouldn't it seem to follow that those memories would be relatively untouched and accurate? (At least until the got called up, at which point they would be skewed by our current mindset?)