5 ms·

I think we are getting closer to furthering the concept that dreaming isn't just a side-effect of thinking (or simply a defrag/clean-up routine upon the previou

by j1vms 10y ago

I think we are getting closer to furthering the concept that dreaming isn't just a side-effect of thinking (or simply a defrag/clean-up routine upon the previous day's thoughts or the mind's expectations for tomorrow). It is itself the key to the thinking process, and sits above and commands the other "agents". It helps us deal with uncertainty and lack of rationality inherent in the universe and our incomplete understanding of it.

nxc18 10y ago
I don't understand this obsession with the "purpose" of dreaming. As far as I have experienced its just noise on the wire that we sometimes are conscious enough to recognize. Having spent enough time in extremely sleep-deprived states for projects recently, I've experienced firsthand a lot of funky stuff going on (e.g. falling asleep and waking up with a full page of class notes in front of me, or realizing that I've started 'dreaming' while editing a document, the dream being seeded by the words I was processing.)
- coldtea 10y ago
  >As far as I have experienced its just noise on the wire that we sometimes are conscious enough to recognize. If it was actual noise it would have absolute minimal statistical chance of having any coherent structure.
  - FeepingCreature 10y ago
    It's noise in brainspace, which is already structured.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      I don't think that explanation has much content. Mangled data with structure are not noise -- at worse they contain some noise (like a dirty dataset).
      - Kliment 10y ago
        Consider a c struct describing a circle, with fields for position, radius, and color. Imagine you have a buffer full of random noise, and you cast it to an array of said structure. You then render the array to a screen, you'll get a bunch of randomly placed colorful circles, rather than a bunch of visual noise.
        coldtea 10y ago
        In this model a series of consecutive bytes has a predefined meaning existing outside of them (namely in the source code that defines the struct), so when they are read they are cast as a struct-circle object. This also only works well for scalar fields, not associations (pointers in the C program's case) and more finely grained items. Also, where would that (the definition of the "struct") happen with the brain? Is there any literature showing anything similar, that we have memory fields that pre-correspond to specific objects through some mechanism? Besides, dreams can have very clear structure and narrative, which takes them outside the realm of what can be achieved with noise, unless the "struct" has fields that correspond to things like emotions, faces, narrative changes, etc.
        quonn 10y ago
        You can also take other analogies. Complex systems usually have several layers of planning or decision making and if you randomize on the top layers, it will still appear to be structured, because the top layers have different degrees of freedom. To take another example, a self-driving car might make a decision to switch the lane. If you randomize on that level, it will randomly switch, but the movement will still be smooth, because this is done one or more layers below.
        dotancohen 10y ago
        That is exactly why we study sleep. We examine the circles not to learn about the data from which those circles are derived, but rather to learn about which structs and other properties are defined in the system. We might find circle struts, square structs, triangle structs, but never spheres, boxes, or pyramids. Or maybe some people (schizophrenics) have the metaphorical three dimensional structs and others do not.
    - socmag 10y ago
      I have lucid dreams almost every night now. I'm talking about entire story arcs with plot twists. Last nights had Donald Trump, my wife and Jennifer Love Hewitt. There were riots going on and people reading newspapers with moving video ink. There was an old book called "The Fall" that was filled with fascinating ink drawings of ritualistic acts (eg: a man sat cross legged on broken fragments of his own arms). Etc. That kind of stuff. Had a full story. Noise on the line in Brain-space could still be the case, but if so we can learn something from that noise regarding the way brain structures work. What I'm saying is if it is just noise, then the noise must be feeding into an entire projective area of creativity that amplifies that noise, not just locally but over time, and in ways that maintain consistency. Really fascinates me
      - Senji 10y ago
        I'm seconding the story/plot elements. I've had some dreams like short sci-fi stories. Some with time travel/causality loop tangles as plot. Some with twists. Complex character and places.
  - Terr_ 10y ago
    Humans appear to be hardcoded to find patterns even when (from a causal and mathematical perspective) they do not exist in the random data. So "meaningful" output doesn't necessarily mean the input wasn't random.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    Rorschach tests seem to have coherent structure, despite being randomly generated blobs.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Only in the superficial way in which we see figures in clouds, tree barks, etc. that we can name. Not in the sense that somebody sees a specific figure in a Rorschach test. But in dreams we have the impression of very specific semblances and "movie-like" experiences.
      - pavel_lishin 10y ago
        > in the superficial way in which we see figures in clouds, tree barks, etc. that we can name. Exactly! I've seen very specific semblances in coffee spills, knot-holes, etc. The reason they're not movie-like is because they're still and static, and not connected directly to my brain. Dreams have the advantage of being on the bare wires, whereas Rorschach tests and the like are air-gapped.
  - Shish2k 10y ago
    Actual noise with no coherent structure is enough for the brain to start imagining patterns - can confirm that having tried it myself, with white noise in my eyes and ears for half an hour, I ended up having dream-like hallucinations while awake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
    - pizza 10y ago
      I want to say, pyramidal cell in visual cortex connectivity network decoherence - similar happens with mice after sleep deprivation, and is reminiscent of the phenomenon of HPPD, and with stochastic resonance.
  - nxc18 10y ago
    Noise 'on the wire' in a neural network is going to look different from noise on an actual copper wire. E.g. noise in the brain might be an increased incidence of errant impulses/signals. There's evidence that sleep involves pruning meaningless connections - noise in this case might mean signals propagating farther than they ought. Noise was meant in an abstract way, not statistically random noise you see in physical circuits.
- bemmu 10y ago
  I have never experienced this. How sleep-deprived do you have to be before you start dreaming while editing a document?
  - adrianN 10y ago
    This is a question where the "wait and see" approach works.
  - stordoff 10y ago
    For me at least, it seems to depend on why I'm sleep deprived and what I'm doing. I spent 100 hours straight through working on my dissertation (only breaks to go fetch food etc.), and felt fine for the entire period - no fatigue, no noticeable cognitive effects, I was alert and coherent - right up until I stopped writing. Then it all just hit me all at once - speaking coherently was a challenge, there was an afterimage if I looked around too quickly, my mind was full of scattered and fragmented half-thoughts (not dreaming, but a similar feeling), and I ended asking a friend to go with me to a building I'd been to hundreds (possibly thousands) of times because I wasn't sure I'd find my way there. To put it simply, I was mentally a mess, and just needed to crash for 18 hours to recover. On the other hand, I'm currently sleep deprived due to insomnia (it's 1320 on Tuesday, and I've had less than an hour sleep since 0900 on Friday), and the effects have been much more gradual. It's a steady build-up of fatigue and general "brain slowness" for lack of a better word (e.g. I was playing Picross last night, and puzzles that normally would take me less than ten minutes took me more than half an hour), but I'm more or less fine - no visual effects, my thoughts are coherent, and it doesn't feel much different to how I'd be after a long day working (just significantly more severe).
    - bemmu 10y ago
      That's amazing to me. I haven't been over 20 hours without sleep for several years, before that I think the max I did was about 35-40 hours which was enough to almost make me hallucinate. I guess I could go for longer, but at that point the only thing I want to do is sleep, any other life goals suddenly become distant second in importance.
visarga 10y ago
Perception operates like guided hallucination.

by j1vms 10y ago

nxc18 10y ago

I don't understand this obsession with the "purpose" of dreaming. As far as I have experienced its just noise on the wire that we sometimes are conscious enough to recognize. Having spent enough time in extremely sleep-deprived states for projects recently, I've experienced firsthand a lot of funky stuff going on (e.g. falling asleep and waking up with a full page of class notes in front of me, or realizing that I've started 'dreaming' while editing a document, the dream being seeded by the words I was processing.)

coldtea 10y ago
>As far as I have experienced its just noise on the wire that we sometimes are conscious enough to recognize. If it was actual noise it would have absolute minimal statistical chance of having any coherent structure.
- FeepingCreature 10y ago
  It's noise in brainspace, which is already structured.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    I don't think that explanation has much content. Mangled data with structure are not noise -- at worse they contain some noise (like a dirty dataset).
    - Kliment 10y ago
      Consider a c struct describing a circle, with fields for position, radius, and color. Imagine you have a buffer full of random noise, and you cast it to an array of said structure. You then render the array to a screen, you'll get a bunch of randomly placed colorful circles, rather than a bunch of visual noise.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        In this model a series of consecutive bytes has a predefined meaning existing outside of them (namely in the source code that defines the struct), so when they are read they are cast as a struct-circle object. This also only works well for scalar fields, not associations (pointers in the C program's case) and more finely grained items. Also, where would that (the definition of the "struct") happen with the brain? Is there any literature showing anything similar, that we have memory fields that pre-correspond to specific objects through some mechanism? Besides, dreams can have very clear structure and narrative, which takes them outside the realm of what can be achieved with noise, unless the "struct" has fields that correspond to things like emotions, faces, narrative changes, etc.
        quonn 10y ago
        You can also take other analogies. Complex systems usually have several layers of planning or decision making and if you randomize on the top layers, it will still appear to be structured, because the top layers have different degrees of freedom. To take another example, a self-driving car might make a decision to switch the lane. If you randomize on that level, it will randomly switch, but the movement will still be smooth, because this is done one or more layers below.
      - dotancohen 10y ago
        That is exactly why we study sleep. We examine the circles not to learn about the data from which those circles are derived, but rather to learn about which structs and other properties are defined in the system. We might find circle struts, square structs, triangle structs, but never spheres, boxes, or pyramids. Or maybe some people (schizophrenics) have the metaphorical three dimensional structs and others do not.
  - socmag 10y ago
    I have lucid dreams almost every night now. I'm talking about entire story arcs with plot twists. Last nights had Donald Trump, my wife and Jennifer Love Hewitt. There were riots going on and people reading newspapers with moving video ink. There was an old book called "The Fall" that was filled with fascinating ink drawings of ritualistic acts (eg: a man sat cross legged on broken fragments of his own arms). Etc. That kind of stuff. Had a full story. Noise on the line in Brain-space could still be the case, but if so we can learn something from that noise regarding the way brain structures work. What I'm saying is if it is just noise, then the noise must be feeding into an entire projective area of creativity that amplifies that noise, not just locally but over time, and in ways that maintain consistency. Really fascinates me
    - Senji 10y ago
      I'm seconding the story/plot elements. I've had some dreams like short sci-fi stories. Some with time travel/causality loop tangles as plot. Some with twists. Complex character and places.
- Terr_ 10y ago
  Humans appear to be hardcoded to find patterns even when (from a causal and mathematical perspective) they do not exist in the random data. So "meaningful" output doesn't necessarily mean the input wasn't random.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Rorschach tests seem to have coherent structure, despite being randomly generated blobs.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Only in the superficial way in which we see figures in clouds, tree barks, etc. that we can name. Not in the sense that somebody sees a specific figure in a Rorschach test. But in dreams we have the impression of very specific semblances and "movie-like" experiences.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      > in the superficial way in which we see figures in clouds, tree barks, etc. that we can name. Exactly! I've seen very specific semblances in coffee spills, knot-holes, etc. The reason they're not movie-like is because they're still and static, and not connected directly to my brain. Dreams have the advantage of being on the bare wires, whereas Rorschach tests and the like are air-gapped.
- Shish2k 10y ago
  Actual noise with no coherent structure is enough for the brain to start imagining patterns - can confirm that having tried it myself, with white noise in my eyes and ears for half an hour, I ended up having dream-like hallucinations while awake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
  - pizza 10y ago
    I want to say, pyramidal cell in visual cortex connectivity network decoherence - similar happens with mice after sleep deprivation, and is reminiscent of the phenomenon of HPPD, and with stochastic resonance.
- nxc18 10y ago
  Noise 'on the wire' in a neural network is going to look different from noise on an actual copper wire. E.g. noise in the brain might be an increased incidence of errant impulses/signals. There's evidence that sleep involves pruning meaningless connections - noise in this case might mean signals propagating farther than they ought. Noise was meant in an abstract way, not statistically random noise you see in physical circuits.
bemmu 10y ago
I have never experienced this. How sleep-deprived do you have to be before you start dreaming while editing a document?
- adrianN 10y ago
  This is a question where the "wait and see" approach works.
- stordoff 10y ago
  For me at least, it seems to depend on why I'm sleep deprived and what I'm doing. I spent 100 hours straight through working on my dissertation (only breaks to go fetch food etc.), and felt fine for the entire period - no fatigue, no noticeable cognitive effects, I was alert and coherent - right up until I stopped writing. Then it all just hit me all at once - speaking coherently was a challenge, there was an afterimage if I looked around too quickly, my mind was full of scattered and fragmented half-thoughts (not dreaming, but a similar feeling), and I ended asking a friend to go with me to a building I'd been to hundreds (possibly thousands) of times because I wasn't sure I'd find my way there. To put it simply, I was mentally a mess, and just needed to crash for 18 hours to recover. On the other hand, I'm currently sleep deprived due to insomnia (it's 1320 on Tuesday, and I've had less than an hour sleep since 0900 on Friday), and the effects have been much more gradual. It's a steady build-up of fatigue and general "brain slowness" for lack of a better word (e.g. I was playing Picross last night, and puzzles that normally would take me less than ten minutes took me more than half an hour), but I'm more or less fine - no visual effects, my thoughts are coherent, and it doesn't feel much different to how I'd be after a long day working (just significantly more severe).
  - bemmu 10y ago
    That's amazing to me. I haven't been over 20 hours without sleep for several years, before that I think the max I did was about 35-40 hours which was enough to almost make me hallucinate. I guess I could go for longer, but at that point the only thing I want to do is sleep, any other life goals suddenly become distant second in importance.

visarga 10y ago

Perception operates like guided hallucination.