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Maybe dreams and hallucinations involve your brain running recognition networks in reverse to generate stimuli?
by Scaevolus 10y ago
Maybe dreams and hallucinations involve your brain running recognition networks in reverse to generate stimuli?
- Geee 10y agoI've hypothesised something like this. Or rather dreams could be generative based on random input (or random 'memory key frames') rather than real input. This assumes that mostly what we 'see' when awake is actually generated by the brain based on incomplete and noisy sampling of the real world.
- wh-uws 10y agoThis is basically the exact hypothesis of a TED talk I saw by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY fascinating stuff
- adrianratnapala 10y agoI think that's pretty much the standard theory nowadays. If I understand my pop-science correctly, our subjective visual field is actually made of images synthesised from objects we have recognised. When we are awake, this mostly matches the real world because we select those objects to match data coming from the eyes. But when we dream or hallucinate, the synthesis circuits fire based on other inputs -- such as noise.