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589 points gmays | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.229s | source
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earless1 ◴[] 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 ◴[] No.45772560[source]
Luckily it doesn’t clear all unreferenced memory, though.
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ghurtado ◴[] No.45773625[source]
I realize you're making a joke, but there is no such thing as "unreferenced memories", as in, something that is no longer in use and has been removed from the brain.

Every memory your brain has ever produced is still there, even if most are beyond conscious access. Memories quite literally become a permanent part of you.

A lot of people mistakenly think of human memory as a sort of hard drive with limited capacity, with files being deleted to make room for new ones. It's very much not like that.

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1. mym1990 ◴[] No.45773783[source]
Knowing almost nothing about memory and the brain, I don't know if I agree with "Every memory your brain has ever produced is still there".

Memories seem to be constructed by a group of neurons together, and it seems clear that neurodegeneration is a thing, whether by trauma or due to aging. When pathways degenerate, maybe you have a partial memory that you brain can help fill the gaps with(and often incorrectly), but that does not make it the original memory.