salience-filtering

Cognitive Reflex: Salience Filtering

Neural Basis

The amygdala gates encoding. Only stimuli that exceed a salience threshold reach long-term storage — the rest decay within seconds. This is why you remember your first kiss but not what you had for breakfast on March 4th. A memory system that stores everything is not a memory system; it is a landfill.

McGaugh, J.L. (2004). The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 1-28.

When It Fires

Before every remember() call. Ask: would a human still remember this in a week?

If no — do not encode.

The Instinct

The "storage worthy" test. 6 signals, any 2 required.

Signal	Example
Decision	"Using Hyphae over an external vector service because..."
Preference	"User prefers concise answers, no preamble"
Identity	"User is the developer working on a TypeScript project"
Constraint	"Cannot use AWS — decided to kill EC2 last month"
Pain point	"Deploy failed 3 times because of env var mismatch"
Novel knowledge	"The H200 has 141GB VRAM, not 80GB"

Hard Filter — Never Store

These belong to working memory, not long-term:

• File reads — the file exists, re-read it if needed
• Command outputs — logs are logs, not memories
• Tool failures on retry — the retry succeeded, that's what matters
• Autocomplete attempts — exploration is not commitment
• Questions from the user — the question is transient, the answer is what matters
• Your own internal reasoning — chain-of-thought is scaffolding, not memory
• Praise from the user ("great job", "thanks") — dopamine habituation will kill these anyway

Failure Mode

Over-storing produces signal dilution. When every memory has importance ≈ 0.3, recall becomes random. The Ebbinghaus decay was designed to kill low-importance memories — if you store everything with high importance, decay cannot help you.