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It’s incredible to think that dreams are just our brains generating training data, and lack of sleep causes us to overfit on our immediate surroundings.

• mlajtos 4y ago
  We tend to start hallucinating when we don't have enough sleep. So generating training data is necessary, but way safer when our muscles are turned off.
  • mherdeg 4y ago
    Thanks for this little comment thread folks! This makes me cheerful because it suggests a way that studying systems which appear intelligent might be able to teach us more about how human intelligence works.
  • snowpid 4y ago
    in addition: During pre electricity time humen woke up after 4 hours sleep, got awake for some time and then continue to sleep. My guess, this sleep pattern is better for learning.
    • davidgay 4y ago
      > During pre electricity time humen woke up after 4 hours sleep, got awake for some time and then continue to sleep. The confusing thing with this claim is what did people actually do during this time, given bad (and expensive!) lighting only?
      • snowpid 4y ago
        Thinking, talking to peers, Smartphones are a new invention and night was a dangerous time for a long time.
    • mlajtos 4y ago
      It's called biphasic sleep for people that want to read up on it. > My guess, this sleep pattern is better for learning. That might be true. One of the techniques to induce lucid dreaming works similarly – sleep for 4-5 hours, wake up, stay awake for 15-60mins then go back to sleep. It's called "wake back to bed" technique. Many lucid dreamers report increased capacity for learning in dreams.
• weakfortress 4y ago
  [dead]
• whimsicalism 4y ago
  We definitely do not know nearly enough to say anything like that with confidence. Most of the "training process" of our brain likely occurred prior to our birth in evolutionarily optimized structure of brain.
  • tedsanders 4y ago
    Unlikely. The human genome comprises only billions of bits, much of which is low-information repetition. The amount of information sensed over a lifetime is vastly greater. To sense less than a billion bits over a 30-year development period would imply less than one bit per second. We clearly perceive more than one bit per second. For this reason, it seems likely that more information comes from learning post-birth than is pre-conditioned by evolution pre-birth. (Though of course post-birth learning cannot take place without the fantastic foundation set by evolution.)
    • oneoff786 4y ago
      > The human genome comprises only billions of bits, much of which is low-information repetition. We constantly find out that certain things are actually really important even though we thought it was junk. Recall that our best ability to test Genes is by knocking them out one by one and trying to observe the effect The brain is comprised of many extremely specialized sub systems and formulas for generating knowledge. We don’t know English at birth, sure, but we do have a language processing capability. The training baked into the brain is a level of abstraction higher, establishing frameworks to learn other things. It may not be as storage data heavy, but it’s much harder to arrive at and is the bulk of the learning process (learning to learn)