5 ms·
Do spiders dream?
- ohiovr 4y agoI wonder what keeps them up at night. It certainly wouldn't be spiders..
- mulmen 4y agoProbably ants?
- anigbrowl 4y agoBirds, obviously https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_an_Old_Lady_Who_Swallowed_a_Fly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_an_Old_Lady_Who_Swal...
- qbrass 4y agoOld ladies, more so.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoI have trouble sleeping because I spend too much time on the web...
- danjoredd 4y agoSome things just bug me
- teeray 4y agoCorn brooms and vacuum cleaners
- jjtheblunt 4y agohumans who freak out about them?
- sva_ 4y agoDiscussion from 2 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32396061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32396061
- nonethewiser 4y agoHot take: this sort of research may not justify public funding. I'm curious where this researcher got their funding. I wasn't able to find it.
- zimpenfish 4y ago> Hot take: this sort of research may not justify public funding. Why not? Seems like an interesting route for maybe getting the first grip on "REM sleep"[1] since "visual input can be controlled in jumping spiders early on (unlike in humans)" and the spider nervous system is simpler (also people don't object _quite_ as much to people sticking probes in spider baby brains as much as human baby brains), any connections between visual stimulus and "REM sleep" can be investigated which -may- lead to advances in understanding our own sleep. [1] if that's what's happening - PZ Myers[2] suggests it may just be periods of alertness since they don't want to get eaten whilst asleep, obviously. [2] https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/08/10/do-spiders-dream-of-arthropod-sheep/ https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2022/08/10/do-spider...
- echelon 4y agoWe need to explore profitable areas at depth and everything else at breadth. Knowledge state space is vast. We have no idea where discoveries may find themselves useful. Animal cognition models may inspire developments in ML. Or they may help us better understand our own brains. It also makes sense that we may want some small subset of the population to be skilled at the intersection of entomology and these other disciplines. The people studying fecal transplants hit it big, for instance.
- bgroat 4y agoI kind of agree with you, with a different conclusion. I actually think must academic research shouldn't really be pubically funded. Instead academia should be much smaller, the state issues a UBI, and people who want to study Spider Dreams can just go off and do that and (optionally) publish online
- etrautmann 4y agoWhere do you think new medical innovation comes from? Who trains the next generation of semiconductor engineers?
- cryptonector 4y agoJumping spiders are the only spiders that have moving eyes. Perhaps other spider species also have dreams but we couldn't observe evidence of REM-like sleep because they can't move their eyes!
- oblak 4y agoDo we really need super sophisticated scans when we can just observer their movements during sleep? I am no spider expert, of course. And yet I would expect a dreaming earthly creature to some sort of convulsions.
- cryptonector 4y agoSure, we might see other movements, but REM-like eye movements are quite a bit more suggestive, or at least they seem that way to me.
- kodah 4y agoWhat do spiders dream of, when they take a little spider snooze? Do they dream of mauling mosquitos or Paul Rudd in an Ant-Man suit?