In any case, fuzzy associative recall is really the "design spec" for a brain, so semi-graceful degradation and fuzzy recall comes for free.
I'm not sure if old-age memory unreliability is totally random - I would not expect it to be. I'd expect these associative recall failures to happen when there are too many memories partially matching the same "key" (activation pattern), which presumably happens mostly when they do have something in common.