There's a very limited amount of ways through which information is handled, stored, communicated, etc. on a very basic level. Our brains will do it using chemical concentrations to store info and then changing the concentrations from cell to cell to process it. What prompts information to be processed is stimuli based. I don't know exactly how it's done on a broader sense, it just looks like a clusterforget of random big words to me. This is why I hate biology which likes to focus on the Words instead of the actual Functions for some reason, unless the teacher knows what's really important and it's definitely not memorizing some words and parts you'll forget about later. Anyways I digress.
Information will also be stored and processed via different States of matter, like magnetic orientations of Nuclei, molecular states, ionic states, and so on. All our current memory devices use very broad Bulk matter states to store information, which are rather inefficient when you think about how much more we could do taking into account each different states of each different particulate. Take Quantum Computing for instance, which utilizes Hydrogen states to store insane amounts of information. Of course, our circuitry also needs to catch up, since an ongoing problem to information processing is the big circuitry which is essential due to poor materials, such as simple metals and alloys which conduct with an amount of resistivity.
You have to remember, the universe's "memory" is state-based.
