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

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.

Luckily it doesn’t clear all unreferenced memory, though.

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.