What Makes Stuff Stick?

I had written down something in one of my little notebooks that I use for random interesting thoughts that come up throughout the day (Most of them right before bed). The gist of it was "Why do certain things such as memories seem to be remembered much better than other things?" Or to put it another way, "Some people can remember certain details that other people will forget almost instantly. Why is that? Why do some things 'stick' to people, and what creates the differences in mind receptability to those things?" It's always fascinated me that I can occasionally remember minute details of obscure things, such as certain dates or names that stick from a reading, while big obvious things like what I did yesterday seem to fade into nothingness in my brain. And I realize that this is partly due to many factors. One of them I assume is gender. It's been proven that guys and girls remember the way to destinations differently (They said it was that prehistorical men were hunters and women were gatherers, which I just "Christian-ly" interpret as ancient Biblical  times). Another reason is probably how we learn, like visual, auditory, and uh "doing" for lack of a better word that could come to me within 2 seconds. Those 2 certainly are hugely important as to what sticks in our mind and what doesn't, but that's not enough for me. What I want is for technology to develop that can take a person and analyze them somehow by a series of tests that may involve things from actual neurological examination to simple "What do you remember from yesterday/last week/last year?" questions. By a thorough examination of the results, experts will be able to present information to someone in an extremely personalized way that makes hopefully almost everything stick. Now of course, the first thought that came to me is "Well our brains are kind of designed to flush out all pointless unneeded stuff so wouldn't our brains be overloaded by all the "sticky" memories?" Well, then I thought about all the data that seems to indicate we only use 10% of our brainpower and however exactly true that may be is not the point. The point is, our brains have incredible potential for memory and for a whole lot of other things that we often don't explore. So if we have technology that can enable us to do those kinds of tests and personalize information presentations to humans, just imagine the learning capacity we could have. Maybe someone happens to remember things best when reading them against a red background, or maybe listening to a certain type of music, or even with the sound of rushing water or combinations of anything. Who knows? Just think of how much quicker we could read and learn if all the information we were given was specifically tailored to stick in our brains...