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)

The problem is not that memories can't be repressed. There's plenty of research demonstrating repression does exist as a defence mechanism. The problem is that even highly evocative memories can also relatively easily be falsified, or modified through elicitation and reframing. Since there's no neurological stenographer, there is no mechanism even in principle to identify the difference between the two. With potential consequences like the satanic panic of recovered and elicited memories of sexual abuse. That's what Elizabeth Loftus and others have shown, and shown so thoroughly that eye witness testimony should never be trusted.

As a counterpoint to this, I am replying here because I can't make myself write a polite response to the GPP.

Yes, witness testimony is always potentially flawed.

But knowing "some repressed memory recovery is false" does not justify saying that repressed memories are not a real thing. Repressed memories do happen. They do come back sometimes. When they do, they are just as valid as any normal memory that a person thinks they always had.

I know because I had them myself. Mine were of trauma in the age range from 5-9. I had a high "ACE score" when I eventually looked into this. I did not have any therapy session prompting the recall, I just remembered them spontaneously around age 15 when I was empathizing with a schoolmate who told me about domestic violence. It was a sickening feeling to have this whole phase of my past come unlocked.

Amazingly, it submerged into repression again. I next remembered it at about age 20. In between, I had years of basically not remembering/knowing that I had any of this trauma or that I had experience the earlier recall. They all came back together, again triggered by an empathetic moment in college. Again it was disorienting to have this whole aspect of my past reopen.

At that later point, I confronted people who were around my childhood and got enough of a painful discussion, confession, and apology to know that these memories were not invented.

I had other forms of childhood trauma that never submerged. I don't know why this one section did.

I find it very offensive for someone to make broad statements that these phenomena do not exist.

This mirrors my experience as well of multiple instances over my life of repressing childhood trauma and some event or conversation suddenly bringing it back to the surface.

Not to minimize your experience or anything like that, I'm just thinking out loud: What's typically the delineation between repressed and "not on the mind at the moment"? We naturally "forget" things all the time because there's no need for them to be in our current context window, e.g. I can't recite every coffee shop I've been to, but maybe if you start talking about a coffee shop with uncomfortable seats, I'll remember the one I went to with uncomfortable seats. Not a comparable experience in general of course, but one wouldn't say I repressed the coffee shop. Is it more like if I started at "uncomfortable coffee shop", nothing came to mind, but then I later remembered only after smelling some special flavor of coffee beans they had had?