I also find the nature of storing information very interesting. One study you may be interested to look up is one performed by Gross at al. in which they tested pattern recognition in monkeys. Gross studied the response of individual intertemporal cortex neurons of monkeys in response to very specific visual stimuli. For example, an individual neuron was monitored while a monkey was shown visual stimuli consisting of varying degrees of a monkey head (profile, ¾, etc.). Gross found that particular neurons would become excited in response to very particular images. For instance, one cell may respond to a 0º head-on image of a monkey face, while another would respond to a 100º face. This suggests that these individual intertemporal cortex neurons have been imprinted with different visual information can later be drawn from for recognition.

I would definitely like to learn more about the physical/chemical processes of learning and if anyone has any articles or insight into the matter please do post here or send me an e-mail (imorton@HC) as I may write a web paper on this topic.