This popped into my mind the other day, and I've been distracted by it since....
You know when you're trying to recall something, and a wrong answer pops into your head, but you know it's wrong. Like how does that work?
E.g. if you're trying to remember who made a song, and your brain can almost simultaneously go - oh it's that band, and then oh no not them.
It feels like there has to be two (at least) parts of the brain working on it at the same time.
Maybe I'll be lucky and a neuroscientist will drop in and link me to a paper. More likely it's something to discuss with wild speculation. Either way, I'm hoping writing it down will stop it distracting me.
Really, what you are asking about is called metamemory. Knowing the jargon in the domain might help you find more useful information. Neuroscientists have examined how the brain monitors and corrects error. For example, here is a paper that examines what regions of the brain appear to be responsible for error correction in a semantic recall task. In some sense, you are right, there are multiple parts of the brain working on recall and error correction at once, but you should really think of the brain as a larger system whose components work together in the same way the fuel injectors and pistons of an engine are part of a larger whole.