What Splitter says about debriefing holds quite some value. It's a generally accepted fact by medical scientists in the fields of neurology/psychiatry that going over the instinctive/automatic/subconscious experiences and brain functions while they are still fresh tends to imprint them a lot better in your conscious mind and memories.
I once read a book called "the tower of dreams" written by a French neurologist, which explains these things through a fictional story. A guy inherits a chateau from a distant uncle and upon moving there, he finds a chest filled with old manuscripts belonging to an ancestor from the 1700s. The manuscripts are actually dream journals and the book evolves into parallel storytelling between the two characters in the present and past. It's actually a very good book giving some insight on how our brain works by dressing it up inside a fictional story, while there still are scientific footnotes on the bottom of the pages that explain things professionally.
I think we can all relate to waking up after a very vivid dream and needing some time to get our bearings and acclimatize back to reality, but when we try to remember what we dreamed about later during the day we can't, despite the vividness or tension of the dream. However, if we take the time to think about and recollect the experience just after we wake up, it becomes that much easier to remember later.
A different instance would be going home drunk and having small memory lapses (not passed-out drunk, but sufficiently so that you miss a few small, 2-3 minute parts of the preceding night and wonder "now what happened between fact A and fact B?")
If you recall the events of the night before going to bed to sleep off the alcohol, you have a much better chance of eradicating these little memory gaps.
What happens is that the brain automatically discards information that's deemed superficial and places it into a subconscious "long time storage" area. However, mulling about it in your head tells your brain that it's important to you and it gets recalled to the conscious "fast access to data" area. Since the subconscious is the main material pool from which dreams get conjured up (some even say dreaming is like a "safety valve", we might be annoyed by something we don't realize and we get a bad dream about it to remind us to do something about it), recording these memories for later recollection is in fact a scientifically accepted tool by medical scientists dealing with a patient's mental health.
A mission debriefing would do just that, reinforce the importance of last mission's events which the human brain would tend to brush aside due to their repetitive nature. Flying a combat mission would be a nearly unforgettable experiece the first time, but flying 50 would have your brain going "bah, same all, same all, off to subconscious memory with you!", until someone forced you to focus and dwell on it, sending the signal that it's important stuff to remember
In fact, some time ago i came across a linked video from a website called factualTV, one that took the viewer through a Lancaster night bombing mission from noon with the engineers working on the aircraft till the next morning when the bombers returned. The actual debriefing process was a long and exhaustive one, with each crewmember interviewed by an officer separately, so as to prevent different airmen from influencing eachother's accounts. In fact they took so much care to prevent them mixing up their memories of the events, that watching it made you feel they were interrogated by enemies and not their own colleagues
I know i'm going off-topic here, but i find it very interesting to see how many different branches of science were used during WWII in the effort to indirectly but crucially improve combat results. Aside from aeronautics, engineering and the code breaking mathematicians led by Alan Turing there was tremendous work done in the UK in other fields, from the psychiatry and psychology used in these airmen debriefings to mathematical optimization models. I once read an article in a military history magazine dealing with the latter one, saying that they used business research algorithms and models to deduce all kinds of stuff, from the obvious logistics to the not so obvious, like the camouflage pattern of the ships in the atlantic convoys. Insane stuff and very interesting due to their relative obscurity, compared to the well known parts of the war.
Anyway, let's stop before i derail this further
