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Weird dreams train our brains to be better learners + Social robots improve outlook

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Weird dreams train our brains to be better learners
https://nautil.us/blog/weird-dreams-trai...r-learners

INTRO: For many of us over the last year and more, our waking experience has, you might say, lost a bit of its variety. We spend more time with the same people, in our homes, and go to fewer places. Our stimuli these days, in other words, aren’t very stimulating. Too much day-to-day routine, too much familiarity, too much predictability. At the same time, our dreams have gotten more bizarre. More transformations, more unrealistic narratives. As a cognitive scientist who studies dreaming and the imagination, this intrigued me. Why might this be? Could the strangeness serve some purpose?

Maybe our brains are serving up weird dreams to, in a way, fight the tide of monotony. To break up bland regimented experiences with novelty. This has an adaptive logic: Animals that model patterns in their environment in too stringent a manner sacrifice the ability to generalize, to make sense of new experiences, to learn. AI researchers call this “overfitting,” fitting too well to a given dataset. A face-recognition algorithm, for example, trained too long on a dataset of pictures might start identifying individuals based on trees and other objects in the background. This is overfitting the data. One way to look at it is that, rather than learning the general rules that it should be learning—the various contours of the face regardless of expression or background information—it simply memorizes its experiences in the training set. Could it be that our minds are working harder, churning out stranger dreams, to stave off overfitting that might otherwise result from the learning we do about the world every day?

Erik Hoel, a Tufts University neuroscientist and author of The Revelations, a cerebral novel about consciousness (excerpted in Nautilus), thinks it’s plausible. He recently published a paper, “ The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization,” laying out his reasoning. “Mammals are learning all the time. There’s no shut-off switch,” Hoel told me. “So it becomes very natural to assume that mammals would face the problem of overlearning, or learning too well, and would need to combat that with some sort of cognitive homeostasis. And that’s the overfitted brain hypothesis: that there is homeostasis going on wherein the effects of the learning of the organism is constantly trending in one direction, and biology needs to fight it to bring it back to a more optimal setpoint.”

What’s distinctive about Hoel’s idea in the field of dream research is that it provides not only a cause of the weirdness of dreams, but a purpose, too... (MORE)


A visit from a social robot improves hospitalized children’s outlook
https://www.uclahealth.org/news/RobinRobotAAP

RELEASE: A new study from UCLA finds a visit from human-controlled robot encourages a positive outlook and improves medical interactions for hospitalized children.

Robin is a social companion robot that stands at about 4 feet tall and has the capabilities to move, talk and play with others while being remotely controlled by humans. Specialists from UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital's Chase Child Life Program conducted hour-long video visits with young patients using Robin, comparing it to interactions using a standard tablet, from October 2020 to April 2021. At the conclusion of the study period, children and their parents were interviewed about their experiences and child life specialists provided feedback in a focus group. Researchers then used a transcript of the discussion to identify recurrent and salient themes.

Ninety percent of parents who had a visit with Robin indicated they were "extremely likely" to request another visit, compared to 60% of parents whose children interacted with the tablet. Children reported a 29% increase in positive affect -- described as the tendency to experience the world in a positive way, including emotions, interactions with others and with life's challenges -- after a visit with Robin and a 33% decrease in negative affect. Children who had a tablet visit reported a 43% decrease in positive affect and a 33% decrease in negative affect.

Parents whose children had a visit from Robin reported their children had no change in positive affect and a 75% decrease in negative affect. Parents whose children had a tablet visit reported their children had a 16% increase in positive affect and no change in negative affect.

The study is being presented on October 11 at the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) National Conference.

Child life specialists who oversaw visits with Robin reported benefits that included a greater display of intimacy and interactivity during play, increased control over their hospital experience and the formation of a new, trusting friendship.

"Our team has demonstrated that a social companion robot can go beyond video chats on a tablet to give us a more imaginative and profound way to make the hospital less stressful," said Justin Wagner, MD, a pediatric surgeon at UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital and senior author of the study. "As the pandemic continues, our patients are still feeling anxious and vulnerable in a variety of ways, so it's critical that we be as creative as possible to make their experiences easier when they need our help."

"We saw the positive effect in children, their families and healthcare workers," adds Wagner. The analysis also suggests benefits to staff, including an increased sense of intimacy with and focus on the patient, increased staff engagement in social care and relative ease in maintaining infection control practices.

In the study, child life specialists also reported the challenges of limited time for patient encounters and a learning curve for operating Robin. The authors say the evidence illustrates benefits for young patients and supports the incorporation of a social robot like Robin in an inpatient pediatric multidisciplinary care setting.

The study's other authors are Dr. Gabriel Oland, Joseph Wertz, W. Scott Comulada, Valentina Ogaryan, Megan Pike, and Dr. Shant Shekherdimian of UCLA.
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