Patient H.M. could hold a conversation normally, recall his childhood in detail, and learn new motor skills - yet could not remember meeting you ten minutes earlier. What does that pattern show about how memory is organised?

C. That forming new declarative memories is a separable function.

Three dissociations do the work: conversation intact means working memory is fine, childhood recall intact means old memories are not stored there, motor learning intact means procedural memory runs elsewhere. The temporal gradient completes it, years-old memories survived and recent ones did not, which is where systems consolidation began.