alt Hacker NewsDowntime for the conscious brain is paramount in life, as that allows the sub-conscious to absorb and act on new information. I have no science to point to, but I believe wholeheartedly that the conscious and sub-conscious minds cannot access the same neurons at the same time, it's like single-ported RAM. More than one thing in my life has been improved by taking a conscious break and letting the subconscious churn
I did alot of AI research around this (memory/finetuning)
Coolest bit of research I cam across was what the brain does during sleep. It basically reduces connection during this. But it also makes you hallucinate (sleep). This was found in researching fish and also training LLMs there's great value in "forgetting" for generalization.
After studying it in LLMs for awhile I also came to your same conclusion about my own brain. Problems are often so complex you must let your brain forget in order to handle the complexity in the same sense I also believe this is the path to AGI.