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> There is substantial disagreement on the function of dreams. Some theories say it’s for strengthening weak memory associations, others say it’s for rehearsing

> There is substantial disagreement on the function of dreams. Some theories say it’s for strengthening weak memory associations, others say it’s for rehearsing dangerous situations. Some say they don’t have any function at all. My favorite theory on dreams is that they help maintain the brain’s ability to generalize, just like a neural network has to deal with overfitting. The idea being, that the dream is supplying the brain’s neural network with noise injection to help it generalize. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560 https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.09560

rantwasp 6y ago
i think it's pretty widely accepted that dreaming serves as a mechanism for memory consolidation (different time scales while attempting to "compress" the information to something useful) and also allows us to run simulations of things that would be either too dangerous or socially unacceptable in the real world. also, i don't think it's noise. It's injecting full scenarios to see how the brain works with it (ie there is structure to the input)
- crazydoggers 6y ago
  Memory consolidation is indeed a possible explanation, but there’s no single widely accepted theory on why we dream, only many competing theories at the moment with various levels of data to support them. It’s also possible that dreams serve multiple roles in brain health, both physiological and psychological. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream#Function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream#Function > also, i don't think it's noise. It's injecting full scenarios to see how the brain works with it I don’t know... my dreams don’t usually seem constructed as a scenario. They seem totally random, moving from random encounter, scene etc, completely unrealistic in many instances. Cars with no front seat, buildings that don’t have physically possible layouts, words that are unreadable, etc. It sure feels like a lot of noise or random crap that somehow my brain is trying to make sense of. To me the “scenario” feels like fitting something plausible to the random data of the dream.
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    the reason for the dreams being "random" is that you don't have input from your sensory system (ie it's turned off and the brain is generating "synthetic" input). you can see how volatile and random out thinking is while dreaming (and you see how important the environment is in grounding our thinking)

rantwasp 6y ago

i think it's pretty widely accepted that dreaming serves as a mechanism for memory consolidation (different time scales while attempting to "compress" the information to something useful) and also allows us to run simulations of things that would be either too dangerous or socially unacceptable in the real world. also, i don't think it's noise. It's injecting full scenarios to see how the brain works with it (ie there is structure to the input)

crazydoggers 6y ago
Memory consolidation is indeed a possible explanation, but there’s no single widely accepted theory on why we dream, only many competing theories at the moment with various levels of data to support them. It’s also possible that dreams serve multiple roles in brain health, both physiological and psychological. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream#Function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream#Function > also, i don't think it's noise. It's injecting full scenarios to see how the brain works with it I don’t know... my dreams don’t usually seem constructed as a scenario. They seem totally random, moving from random encounter, scene etc, completely unrealistic in many instances. Cars with no front seat, buildings that don’t have physically possible layouts, words that are unreadable, etc. It sure feels like a lot of noise or random crap that somehow my brain is trying to make sense of. To me the “scenario” feels like fitting something plausible to the random data of the dream.
- rantwasp 6y ago
  the reason for the dreams being "random" is that you don't have input from your sensory system (ie it's turned off and the brain is generating "synthetic" input). you can see how volatile and random out thinking is while dreaming (and you see how important the environment is in grounding our thinking)