Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Our weirdest dreams could be training us for life, new theory says

#1
C C Offline
https://gizmodo.com/our-weirdest-dreams-...1846895897

EXCERPTS: . . . “Life is boring sometimes,” said Hoel in a release. “Dreams are there to keep you from becoming too fitted to the model of the world.”

The new theory is now one of a countless number of attempts to explain the purpose of dreams. Indeed, this field is filled with all sorts of hypotheses, including dreams as wish fulfillment, a side-effect of neural pulses, a process to help with the consolidation of long-term memories, threat simulation, among many other ideas. Hoel’s theory is unique in that it borrows from artificial intelligence, using deep neural networks as an analogue for biological brains.

Hoel got the idea while considering the way computers learn. An artificial neural network is fed a dataset for training, but a problem arises when it becomes too familiar with the data. The AI’s world becomes very small, as it assumes the dataset is a complete and true representation of the real world. In reality, the world can be a chaotic, unpredictable, and messy place. This problem is known as “overfitting,” and it “leads to failures in generalization and therefore performance on novel datasets,” according to the paper.

“During training, artificial neural networks are being fitted to the data,” explained Hoel in an email. “If the network is discriminating between cats and dogs, for instance, it might become fixated on some aspects of cats that is particular to those 100 images that make up the data.” For example, the cat photos might’ve been taken during the day, whereas the dog photos were taken at night.

“By adding noise to the images, or blacking out parts of them, you will improve the generalization to new and novel data sets, like images that contain both night and day,” he said. “I’m arguing that the brain probably faces this problem of learning too well, and dreams help give us exposure to the wildly different stimuli that we need to prevent getting fixated on inconsequential aspects of our lives.”

Or, as Hoel writes in his study, “it is the very strangeness of dreams in their divergence from waking experience that gives them their biological function.” And by “hallucinating” out-of-the-box “sensory stimulation every night,” our brains can escape over-generalizations, resulting in improved task performance.

[...] Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University and author of Pandemic Dreams, said the new theory “seems congruent with the most bizarre dreams but not with banal, realistic or repetitive ones,” she wrote in an email. Interestingly, Barrett, who wasn’t involved in the new research, believes there’s a basic fallacy in the quest to pinpoint a “function” for dreams.

“We’d never ask, ‘What is the function of waking thought?’ or at least we’d never expect a one-phrase answer. It’s for everything,” she explained. “I suspect the reason there’s no consensus on the function of dreams is that they’re also performing a vast number of psychological and biological tasks.” (MORE - details)
Reply
#2
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:Or, as Hoel writes in his study, “it is the very strangeness of dreams in their divergence from waking experience that gives them their biological function.” And by “hallucinating” out-of-the-box “sensory stimulation every night,” our brains can escape over-generalizations, resulting in improved task performance.

Dreams may be akin to the play instinct in this respect. They are the exertion of effort and thought in overcoming a simulated scenario of challenges and problems to help refine us and prepare us for wakeful living. Besides that they offer rewarding and uplifting experiences in themselves for us when life is getting us down or stressing us out too much.
Reply
#3
Syne Offline
When most people don't remember the vast majority of their dreams, this theory doesn't seem to offer enough survival benefit to warrant the evolution of the trait.
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Are dreams predictions? C C 0 88 Dec 6, 2022 05:30 PM
Last Post: C C
  Are Dreams an Alternate Reality? Zinjanthropos 8 560 May 4, 2021 04:53 PM
Last Post: C C
  China's SETI program will find alien life first, says Chinese astronomer C C 0 108 Jan 27, 2021 10:17 PM
Last Post: C C
  Ten of the world’s weirdest diseases and disorders C C 0 307 Oct 9, 2017 05:28 AM
Last Post: C C
  Why the 37th parallel is the weirdest part of America C C 4 2,232 Sep 8, 2016 08:31 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist
  Interpreting precognitive dreams Magical Realist 0 467 Nov 21, 2015 09:51 PM
Last Post: Magical Realist



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)