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earless1 | 4 months ago

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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dathinab|4 months ago

this might explain how "power napping" (<30min) can help so much when you are sleep deprived even through it's too short to really count as sleep. I wonder if you can find that when sleep deprived people power nap a "flush" happens then

hinkley|4 months ago

There’s a phenomenon we have known about since at least the late 1980s when Race Across America riders were using it.

Essentially these guys try to stay up for the first few days and then sleep less than 8 hours after that. Way less. Many of them end up hallucinating by the end, and only their extreme fitness levels probably save them from just dying from lack of sleep.

The trick is that waking up to daylight makes you feel more rested. So the teams would have their riders sleep 2-3 hours from just before dawn until dawn so they would wake up to sunlight. Physiologically the difference is small, but psychologically it’s much bigger.

Some of the effect of power napping is likely the same sort of trickery, just as caffeine is partly trickery and partly adrenal.

layer8|4 months ago

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

blauditore|4 months ago

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)

DenisM|4 months ago

Cleanup is an LRU process.

Once a memory lapses you have to relearn from life experience (or not at all).

bigbuppo|4 months ago

I forgot what I was going to type, but I didn't get enough sleep last night.

jyounker|4 months ago

Are you sure about that?

ghurtado|4 months ago

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.

Zenul_Abidin|4 months ago

Is Sun Microsystems in the room with us?

hinkley|4 months ago

Skip enough sleep and parts of your brain will try to nap while you’re doing things like meetings.

timeinput|4 months ago

Depending on the meeting it might be worth a nap even if I'm well rested.

apatheticonion|4 months ago

This is a hilarious comment, I actually laughed out loud