Consolidation
What a memory does with idle time: replaying what it already holds, and keeping what recurs.
Like you're twelve
Practise a piece of music for an hour and you get a bit better. Sleep, and you get better again — without touching the instrument. Your brain went back over the day and worked on it while you were not there.
Nothing new arrived. What changed is how what you already had is organised.
Precisely
Consolidation replays stored patterns back through the write rule. A pattern that recurs is reinforced each time it is replayed, so its attractor deepens; nearby hard locations holding versions of the same thing become candidates to merge, so the codebook can shrink where the data permits it.
Two things fall out. The number of locations after consolidation reflects how much genuinely distinct material the memory holds, rather than how many requests it received. And a merged location reconstructs what its unmerged parts would have — merging changes the storage cost, not the answer.
Consolidation can also go up a level. Stripping the context from a set of stored cases leaves what they have in common, which is a rule rather than a case; doing the same to a set of rules leaves a schema. Each pass trades detail for generality, and the detail does not come back.