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).

A valid memory spontaneously re-entering your mind is different.

The idea of "repressed memories" was that people had hidden memories that they couldn't access, even if they tried. According to the theory, even if someone brought up the past event and tried to remind the person about it, they would be unable to recall it happening because their brain had blocked it out.

The idea was that only intervention by a therapist or some other special event could help the person "unlock" the repressed memories, making them available for remembering again.

What was really happening was that some therapists were leading people into "remembering" things that didn't happen through aggressive prompting and pushing, much like what happens when an aggressive investigator convinces a vulnerable person to falsely confess to something they didn't do.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are inaccessible, partly corrupted memories encoded in the hippocampus. I suspect most of them cannot be prompted by a therapist though, and likely there is no practical way to recover them.

I think it's all a matter of finding a trigger (or reference) to grab the memory. A therapist talking to you almost certainly wouldn't achieve that, but walking down the street and smelling an odd smell might.

I once found a recording of a lab session in high school physics. A day I completely forgot about. A moment that had no bookmarks in my brain.

Other things about that day were surfaced. How my braces felt and the fear I felt about forgetting a textbook.

All real, but unsurfaced until then.