Hippocampal Rehearsal

Problem

Archived items might as well not exist if the agent never thinks about them again, even when the current context makes them relevant. The bottleneck is not the storage itself — the item is on disk and addressable — but the absence of any mechanism that periodically pulls archived items back into the agent's active attention, the way the hippocampus rehearses memories during sleep. Without rehearsal, the agent has perfect recall in principle and amnesia in practice.

Solution

When salience scoring matches against archived items (embedding similarity, keyword match, explicit reference), the matched item is reactivated into short-term memory for one or more cycles. The original archive copy stays untouched.

When to use

• Archived memory items become relevant again and must re-enter short-term context.
• A salience scorer can match current context against the archive reliably.
• Reactivation can be bounded so short-term memory does not flood.