I have been thinking about a similar approach for controlling the creation and pruning of synapses along a dendrite. If there is a “metabolic sustenance factor” that feeds a set of synapses this can be manipulated into replacing boosting and forgetting.
“An interesting side note on path-based SDRs is the biologically plausible enforcement of scarcity - there could also be the metabolic equivalent of a growth promoter shared over the length of each path SDR. An “empty” dendrite could grow a lot from whatever activation it receives - a “full” dendrite would starve older synapses to reinforce new synapse learning.
Another tweak is that the distance between two connections could be an influencing factor in learning to enforce spacing of synapse growth.”