on the tip of your tongue....and recall yet takes so long

so you know when you are trying to remember something (name of film, actor in film etc) and you know you know it, and your conscious effort tells you you know it, but not what it is - indeed, sometimes, it seems, the harder you try, the less you are able to recall the item - so how does this work? then you get distracted (perhaps for a long time, but sometimes just for a shortish while) and then suddenly, in an inappropriate moment (sleep awakeinging in extremis) the datum/factoid comes flooding back


so that is weird right? I mean the neuroscience of the brain says its a set of synapses that are slow, but not that slow, organised into some sort of (very high degree) holographic, or swarm storage....so retrieval might be slow - each "hop" in the net needs lots of time by silicon standards, and you need quite a few hops...

I am guessing that the memory is also partitioned, and there's only so much resource between the clusters of memory items and those resources are used to statmux requests for retrieval - if some region is currently isolated because you are
busy using the "links" to it for soemthing else, then is just like "call blocking" in a telephone net - it takes a while...and then, when you have re-organized things due to task switching, the pathways are freed up and a queued request (call) gets thru - this also helps explain the patchy way memory loss works - if you actually lose "pinout" from a region, it might all be still holding info, but you simply can't route to it....without re-training some other component - a lot of this reminds me of large scale P2P systems where request routing is slow and complex and re-org of nodes (known as "churn" in systems like pastry or kademlia) leads to some possible loss of info, and certainly to potential long periods (compared with single node performance) of no access....

curt cobain said something about memories...and I dont have a gun, which wasnt true