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Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain

(news.mit.edu)
589 points gmays | 1 comments | 31 Oct 25 13:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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earless1 ◴[31 Oct 25 14:40 UTC] No.45772465[source]▶
So biological garbage collection pauses then? skip sleep, and the brain tries to run gc cycles during runtime. Causing attention and performance latency spikes. Evolution wrote the original JVM.
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layer8 ◴[31 Oct 25 14:47 UTC] No.45772560[source]▶
Luckily it doesn’t clear all unreferenced memory, though.
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blauditore ◴[31 Oct 25 15:24 UTC] No.45773081[source]▶
Fun fact: Suppressed/hidden/lost memories due to trauma that appear to re-surface through therapy are not a real thing, as previously thought (and still by some psychotherapists). Nowadays it's understood by psychology that any memories "re-surfacing" in therapy are in fact newly created, although the patient themselves cannot tell the difference. Allegedly, whole accusations of childhood abuse may have been created out of thin air, without the victim realizing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy (see research section)

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layer8 ◴[31 Oct 25 15:40 UTC] No.45773304[source]▶
People can remember things that hadn’t re-entered their mind for decades. It certainly happened to me a number of times (completely trauma-unrelated and not actively elicited).
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worldsayshi ◴[31 Oct 25 15:50 UTC] No.45773439[source]▶
My guess is that long term memory recovery is inherently a reconstruction from the pieces that you have retained. So it is not unlikely to include dreamed up parts.
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1. layer8 ◴[31 Oct 25 15:58 UTC] No.45773550[source]▶
The accuracy of recollection can certainly vary, but the point is that some information is retained long-term even when it isn’t made use of in the meantime. Of course one could argue that actually it is being made use of unconsciously, but I’m skeptical of that, given the relative irrelevance of the details that can be recollected. It’s also not that difficult to imagine that some memory-representing micro-structures in the brain just happen to be stable over decades even when they remain untapped.