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.

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)

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).

This is a more precise statement than just "you can recall things you thought you forgot".

It is specifically about trauma, and generally you don't forget traumatic events and that's often a big part of the problem. We are not talking about trivial things like the name of your maths teacher in high school, which have a tendency to come and go.

It is also specifically about therapy, that is an environment where you are actively encouraged to recall memories. We know how easy it is to make up memories, especially with the help of a third party (here, the therapist).

Combine the two: memories that are hard to forget and an environment conductive to making false memories and it becomes very likely that the "lost" memories are completely made up.