Some people have more than others. It's a muscle, just like everything else. Use it and it builds. Neglect it and it atrophies. Well, there's your ritual. Funny thing - I write notes, but I never read them. However, the act of writing them cements their content in my memory. If it doesn't, going back and reading my notes does not jog my memory. It's a ritual, not a reference. I only remember the things that are interesting to me, by and large. On the plus side, I find many things interesting. Yogi Berra misremembered lots of things. It made him famous. You could do worse. If I'm doing research for a screenplay or novel or something I really need to go digging for, I use Novamind and have done since 2003 or so. Learning curve has gotten steeper, though. Using it, on the other hand, is a really good way to cement things in your head… and give you something you can reference later....how do you reconcile the power of working memory with the limits of human capacity?
I personally have a terrible memory with almost zero ability to remember dates, names, or quotations. I know the way is not rote-memorization, but the only thing that seems to fix this problem is when I blunder and make incorrect assertions when conversing with others.
One experiment I have been trying is to organize references on topics that interest me, using Mendeley in the case of hard-science topics and org-mode (Breaking big topics into lists upon sublists) for more general topics. I have friends that set up personal wikis for information pertaining to their hobbies, too.