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Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
- dukeofdoom 5y agoMakes sense. Baby wildebeests has to learn to walk in minutes after birth. Hungry Lions are literally waiting for their lunch to be born.
- lupire 5y agoUnit-testing the software before deployment.
- darepublic 5y agoYes and just like software it doesn't matter the test results were still going live
- fungiblecog 5y agoI'm sure there is brain activity that prepares the baby for birth, but calling it a "dream" is just clickbait
- xkeysc0re 5y agoThe researchers call it "dream-like" and it is, in the sense that, like a dream, the neurons are stimulated and activated as though sensory input was occurring despite there being no actual stimuli.
- deburo 5y agoHuh, how weird. How are those stimulis generated? Through the mother's eyes or brain activity?
- pvaldes 5y agoFoetus can have, and will have, direct experience of the world before birth. In the last months of pregnancy they definitely can hear what is happening outside. Will also react to strong noises or gentle pressure. Seeing differences at daylight or obscurity while in the womb does not seem impossible. Anybody that has closed the fist over a strong flashlight knows that the flesh is not totally opaque. Is this dreaming? Maybe, maybe not. Other explanations are possible.
- echelon 5y ago
- euske 5y agoI always wondered how our brain is pre-wired to recognize 3D objects right after a birth, but this article is saying that eyes are giving fake image-like input to our brain so that it can perform "pre-training"? Does this imply that our brain is truly a blank slate if these initial seeds aren't given?
- fossuser 5y agoI don't think brains are pre-wired to recognize 3D objects. There was an example case of a blind man with cataracts getting it fixed at around 50 years old. People were curious if he would be able to know if a sphere was round just by looking at it without touching it. IIRC - not only could he not do that, but he couldn't visually interpret shadows (saw them as black splotches - didn't recognize depth), and was confused why objects got smaller as they were moving away. I think the human visual system trains on a lot of visual input data, but it typically happens at the baby stage where you can't really interact.
- echelon 5y agoFascinating anecdote, and I'd love to see the report on this. I wonder what else they learned from such an interesting case study. But I doubt it's 100% "no pre-wiring". What about gravity and musculature? Surely brains must know or train on these in some way before birth. And what about fight or flight reflexes and presupposing monsters in the shadows? My understanding is that these had a primitive evolutionary basis and that we came hardwired to respond to certain stimuli.
- gojomo 5y agoAbre los ojos.
- Infernal 5y agoOne of my favorite movies.
- khr 5y agoThis article didn't link to the research article directly. Here it is for those interested: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/eabd0830/ https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/eabd0830/
- gojomo 5y agoSomething about this reminds me of the 'Winning Ticket Hypothesis' in artifical neural networks: that some 'random' initializations prime a network far better for later faster learning. From https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635 https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635 - the abstract: Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of inference without compromising accuracy. However, contemporary experience is that the sparse architectures produced by pruning are difficult to train from the start, which would similarly improve training performance. We find that a standard pruning technique naturally uncovers subnetworks whose initializations made them capable of training effectively. Based on these results, we articulate the "lottery ticket hypothesis:" dense, randomly-initialized, feed-forward networks contain subnetworks ("winning tickets") that - when trained in isolation - reach test accuracy comparable to the original network in a similar number of iterations. The winning tickets we find have won the initialization lottery: their connections have initial weights that make training particularly effective. We present an algorithm to identify winning tickets and a series of experiments that support the lottery ticket hypothesis and the importance of these fortuitous initializations. We consistently find winning tickets that are less than 10-20% of the size of several fully-connected and convolutional feed-forward architectures for MNIST and CIFAR10. Above this size, the winning tickets that we find learn faster than the original network and reach higher test accuracy. Are these innate patterns of activity priming mammalian brains in a similar way?
- teawrecks 5y agoIn the context of real life we draw a distinction between thus neonatal dreamlike state and post birth "reality". But in the context of a neural net, I don't think such a distinction is necessary. They both sound like they're training the network. Still interesting to consider the parallels though.
- emtel 5y agoIt’s not just mammals. I’ve always been astounded that spiders know how to spin webs. Their mothers don’t teach them how!
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- imbnwa 5y agoPlato grinning ear-to-ear somewhere right now Freud also predicted this in that he postulated that hallucination was more primordial than actual sense-experience
- noisy_boy 5y agoAt a more "pop" level, Avatar fans with a told-you-it-is-totally-possible expression.
- axiom92 5y agoSimilar: https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00064-7 https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(21)00064-7 Dreams help the brain in generalizing the world. From the article: "That is, dreams are a biological mechanism for increasing generalizability via the creation of corrupted sensory inputs from stochastic activity across the hierarchy of neural structures."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- yellow_lead 5y agoThe full title is pretty funny. > Eyes wide shut: How newborn mammals dream the world they’re entering Reference to the Kubrick film I assume.
- sjg007 5y agoDo they do this in the dark and is it correlated with light input.. so is the eye/brain responding to stimulus even though the eyes aren't open yet?
- rudyfink 5y agoI recall once hearing a talk that discussed, what I recall as, "test patterns" being run across the visual cortex prior to birth. Essentially, waves / patterns of stimulation would go across the optic structure that would be used to, again as I recall it, "calibrate" the visual system. I dug a bit and was able to find this paper https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15289028/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15289028/ , which seems to track my memory. It has a number of forward and backward citations if you are interested. Perhaps someone with far more than my vague recollection of a talk will step in though!
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoAre these the same patterns one can see by applying pressure on the inner corners of the eyes? Massaging my tear ducts makes me see strange black/white/gray/color patterns that change over time.
- KhoomeiK 5y agoReminds me of recent Reinforcement Learning work on learning from internal world model "dreams". https://worldmodels.github.io/ https://worldmodels.github.io/
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- malkia 5y agoThat's nature's loading screen! Awesome discovery....
- gradschoolfail 5y agoTIL sheep dream about nonelectric androids
- mindfulplay 5y agoReally fascinating. Does this mean the world "view" is encoded into the DNA somehow and that then gets transformed into neural activity? How could a few billion pairs of acids encode such a world? What's even more fascinating is that emotions, behaviors, imagination and dreams must all be encoded and not learnt with just a billion-odd pairs / bits. Meanwhile, it takes a few megabytes for us humans to encode a decent Hello World program in a modern programming environment.
- smegger001 5y agocomplex emergent behaviors from simple rule systems is quiet common. conways game of life is derived from 4 simple rules yet shows complex behavior including the ability to operate a universal turring machine. a few hundred megs of instructions seems quiet reasonably able to generate a highly complex system
- anthk 5y agoYou can play Tetris on GNU sed. You can play Zork on a PostScript interpreter by simulating the ZMachine on PS.
- yreg 5y agoThe dreaming doesn't simulate a complex world. As I understand it, it might be something like a simple blob moving around in 2D space.
- l33tman 5y agoIt's just expanding circular waves of activity on the retina. Don't read too much into the articles clickbait headline :)
- wombatmobile 5y ago> Crair said. “It’s like dreaming about what you are going to see before you even open your eyes.” Given that we don’t know what dreaming is, that analogy adds unnecessary confusion to interpreting the phenomenon described in TFA.
- Amin699 5y agoMice, of course, differ from humans in their ability to quickly navigate their environment soon after birth. However, human babies are also able to immediately detect objects and identify motion, such as a finger moving across their field of vision, suggesting that their visual system was also primed before birth.
- imvetri 5y agohmm. when the brain is floating in the stomach, it already had built how the world would be. Initial sense - Floating, so floated and floater exists. something exist, let me figure it out. oh sometimes I sense vibration, some are slow and repetitive, some are musical, oh then learns about vibration and source of vibration. then predicts what could be the source of vibration.
- jherm7 5y agoPoor giraffes dreaming they can walk right when they're born only to come tumbling down. Ah, gravity, thou art a heartless bitch.
- shannifin 5y ago> A new Yale study suggests that, in a sense, mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are even born. "In a sense" ... A bit of a click-baity title for what amounts to suggesting that brain wiring is primed for sensing the world, which is not news. The study itself looks to be more about how the brain primes itself (visual systems specifically). It may or may not have anything to do with dreaming.
- system2 5y agoPeople do not read without click-bait anymore.
- joshxyz 5y agoWhat if this life we're living is one of those dreams?
- Geee 5y agoIs it possible that there's some kind of neural transfer from the mother's brain during pregnancy? I've been wondering if there is or if it's all genetic. Evolutionary it would be very interesting if consciousness wasn't genetic, but transferred during pregnancy.
- UnFleshedOne 5y agoParent organisms do influence the way their children develop, at what extent is a different question (I understand it is fractal spaghetti all the way down). It seems planaria worms can do something like that [0]. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5051648/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5051648/
- yellowapple 5y agoI'd be pretty curious about the mechanism for such transfer. The umbilical cord doesn't contain nerves AFAIK (and even if it did, the whole point of placental reproduction is to isolate the embryo/fetus from the mother, so probably no nervous connection there, either), so that'd preclude a direct connection between their nervous systems. Maybe hormones or some other chemical means?
- chromanoid 5y agoEpigenetics are one way. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127768/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6127768/
- nabla9 5y ago"Retinal waves prime visual motion detection by simulating future optic flow", Science 23 Jul 2021: Vol. 373, Issue 6553, eabd0830 DOI: 10.1126/science.abd0830 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/eabd0830 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6553/eabd0830
- snack-boye 5y agoImagine if this is the dream, as we get older and stuff seems to make less sense is actually getting closer to birth.
- momirlan 5y agoThat's dementia
- z3t4 5y agoLikely the fetus get spatial sense at some stage before birth...
- _pmf_ 5y ago"Science"
- l33tman 5y agoTo put this into context, retinal waves (essentially self-propagating excitations along the retina) pre-birth have been known to exist and help neural organization for what must be 20-30 years. What's new in this paper is that they additionally confirmed that the direction of the propagating waves coincided with the mouse's typical optical flow pattern, essentially helping priming motion-detection neurons in addition to the well-known edge-detection neurons early. I wouldn't compare this to dreaming really, it's a very different process where top-down connections hallucinate sensations. This is a completely bottom-up process, it's more or less like a test-bench connected to the optic nerve generating moving edges pre-birth.
- Tycho 5y agoMaybe telepathy/ESP is real, it’s just that we lose it soon after birth, or in early childhood, like eidetic memory. Or perhaps some people retain it longer - or some animals, hence all the mythical beasts.
- chromanoid 5y agoYeah, this is much more probable than a mechanism to replay genetically/biochemically encoded activation patterns that help survival after birth.
- Tycho 5y agoWhy the sarcasm?
- chromanoid 5y agoBecause it is an obviously improbable reasoning. Ever heard of Occam's razor?
- Tycho 5y agoI never said anything about probable.
- g3e0 5y agoReminds me of the theory that dreaming (and music) evolved to "practice" hypothetical situations and emotions before they happen - https://whatismusic.info/blog/AUnifiedTheoryOfMusicAndDreaming.html https://whatismusic.info/blog/AUnifiedTheoryOfMusicAndDreami... It's easy for me to believe that this could have initially evolved to give babies slightly more preparation for the outside world (and therefore a slightly higher chance of survival), and that we just happen to retain the ability throughout adulthood.
- archibaldJ 5y agoOnce upon a time, I woke up from a dream and was greeted by friendly beings. They looked at me in wonder, and were surprised I’m awake. The lights in the room were very cozy. Soon I went back to sleep, and there I was, veritably back in this world again. Now I do not know whether I had taken LSD and visited a different world, or I had temporarily woken up from this dream, and now making sense of the waking up as “a LSD experience”.
- __ryan__ 5y agoAlternatively, you were dreaming the whole time. I have _many_ dreams where I "woke up". I'm totally convinced it's real in the dream-- even though I also have telekinesis and can fly.
- dorkwood 5y agoI've had dreams where I'm lying in my bed, trying to fall asleep. I wouldn't have known I was even dreaming if I didn't stop to check. For those wondering how to check if you're dreaming: pinch your nose closed with your fingers. If you can inhale through closed nostrils, you're dreaming.
- throwawaybchr 5y agoThese kinds of claims are near impossible to prove with certainty so it all seems very self gratifying
- xyzzy21 5y agoSo mammals are NOT Tabula Rasa at all. Some people today need to learn this.
- tabtab 5y agoA maze and cheese simulator.
- melfrey 5y agoTo dream about the world that they are about to experience, that's truly amazing. Imagine that the newborns are not aware of the dangers, cope with their surroundings, and become familiar with them.