New theory proposes ‘forgetting’ is a form of learning

I think this is what happens during sleep (a part of it).

There have been times where I've been unable to "fall" asleep, but stayed in my bed, completely unaware of my surroundings or anything else except what's going on inside my mind.

It feels like my thoughts were starting from a single point, then randomly branching off into multiple directions (one after the brisk "completion" of the other), and each path had a certain "feel" to it -- as if my brain was testing things it had "learned" or "inferred" (and the mental models it had collected), or even things it wasn't too certain about or even guessing -- simply to see how it would "feel" when thought.

It's like your mind has a complex array of filters/gates that decide how an input will be processed -- and these filters are constantly changing, rearranging, and growing more complex as you grow; so during sleep it feels like the mind is in a loop, constantly throwing very simple things that have collected in memory, into the "mix"/filters to see what happens (will those filters adjust, a la conditioning and adjusting weights like in a neural net? Will some new and palpable way of looking at things be found? Are some thoughts/paths no longer needed? Should other thoughts/paths be prioritized?).

I think our minds hold onto all the inputs we've gotten during the day, and then process them at night, is what I'm trying to say. I imagine this is one of the big reasons why we sleep so much as we do (compared to hunger-gatherers, and primitive tribes): we have so much sensory input that gets collected during the day (including our thoughts, albeit the thinking we do during the day serves the same end: forcing our heads to deal with new information to figure out what to do with it).

And then you have meditation, that basically forces you to clean out the "volatile memory," so it doesn't interefere throughout the day. Basically telling your mind, "I don't need to incorporate this shit into my thinking. It's not vital. Dump the memory onto the disk, and we'll deal with it later, but not now!"

I've noticed that sleep completely changes my train of thought.

On any given day, I'll have a certain "mindset" or overarching "feeling" for the day. If I stay up for a day or two, that feeling will remain. And no matter what I do, that feeling rarely changes throughout the day. BUT, when I go to sleep, it's completely different. I always wake up with a new "train" of thought. Like when I was awake, the train was going on a certain rail line, but during sleep it was moved to a different one.

Good news for me.

Forgetting is similar to regularization mechanisms in deep learning like dropout. You tend to forget details, and this makes your mental models simpler over time. The memories that get refreshed are the details that actually matter and keep tripping you up

What also does this mean for psychedelics? Could they "reopen" the filters that were earlier preventing new signals from being found?

Something like switching from a digital radio dial (every .2 MHz) to an analog dial (everything in between) - you can find something you had missed before.

I don't know how much of this has to do with forgetting so much as attaching significance. One thing I realized I was able to do for much of my life (perhaps not quite as well as I used to) is keep the concept of sound and word separate. Of course we can do this for sound effects. I've been able to maintain this for most word sounds. This was very apparent when learning foreign languages, reproducing the sounds was the easy part--just make the noise you hear.