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What if dreaming is the whole point of sleep?
- throwaway888abc 2y agofixed link https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-what-if-dreaming-is-the-whole-point-of-sleep https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-w...
- indigoabstract 2y agoYou have a typo in the url. Otherwise, very interesting article!
- galaxyLogic 2y agoSeems that dreams are needed, but the article doesn't really give a good explanation why
- 082349872349872 2y agoSince the late 80s (when neural nets were a thing) I've figured that dreams are a way to "reweight" brain encodings: throw noise in, and the pathways to whatever strong signals come out probably ought to be reduced.
- phkahler 2y agoFrom some strange experience I believe REM sleep does "reprocess" things and change weights. Deeper more ingrained stuff requires this more disruptive process to change.
- galaxyLogic 2y agoI wonder do Androids dream of electric sheep? I mean seriously if dreams do a necessary function for the human brain, doesn't it mean that AI and LLMs should benefit from dreaming as well?
- withinboredom 2y agoThat’s not how the brain works. Neurons will generate and connect dendrites while awake or asleep, creating new pathways that simply didn’t exist moments before. Further, the longer a dendrite stays connected, the more optimized it becomes (myelin sheathing aka “white matter”) and then it doesn’t go away even if it becomes unused. It probably (helps) explains why we fall back on old habits so easily, even if we’ve avoided them for years.
- 082349872349872 2y agoLike double entry bookkeeping, wouldn't it be possible to just add an inhibitory pathway to get the same effect as dialing down the excitatory one?
- withinboredom 2y agoThere isn't such a thing as inhibiting a pathway in the brain. Not directly, anyway. There are inhibitory neurons that attach to other neurons and prevent them from firing. These neurons literally hug other neurons to prevent them from firing, which has the effect you're wanting but may not have the desired macro effect as there may be ways to still fire the neuron (not enough inhibition, or other brain chemicals like cortisol -- stress -- might prevent it from being fully inhibited). Further, the brain mostly works on creating more efficient pathways vs. inhibiting. If a behavior previously existed, life tends to suggest that it was important at some point and may be important at another point. For example, my muscle memory for some activities still exists from being in the military. I will still annihilate entire teams in a game of paintball (which is pretty much the only place these skills are still useful, short of returning to a warzone). Another example is that parts of your brain are dedicated to recognizing everyone you ever knew. Short of them dying or moving away, eventually, you may run into them again.
- gjjydfhgd 2y agoSleep might have multiple purposes. There is some recent research that some chemicals are flushed through the brain during sleep to remove byproducts. Why that can't happen without sleep is another interesting question.
- tibbydudeza 2y agoBecause when we are awake our brains run "hot" producing chemical waste - evolving on a world experiencing predictable day and night cycles led to sleep - it is not like we could do anything without sunlight back then. It was also dangerous to do anything i.r.o nocturnal predators.
- polishdude20 2y agoI wonder if this is heavily based on the fact that during sleep, all inputs are shut down. Like, you can't hear, you can't see, you can't feel, no smell, no taste. All senses to the outside world are off. What is it about external inputs that makes the brain not be able to do it's sleep "duties"? Is it that external inputs take up processing power that needs to be used during sleep instead?
- funnym0nk3y 2y agoBut that's not true. The senses are not off as you wake up when light increases, when there is a loud sound or when there is a stron smell. In addition there are numerous examples that the sound of the alarm clock gets integrated into the dream, maybe as a telephone sound for example.
- Nevermark 2y ago> Why that can't happen without sleep is another interesting question. I would guess that since sleep has been optimized by evolution for a long time, and evolution is so creative, that there are now countless dependencies on that time/phase separation. But umbrella reasons probably include all of these: 1. To recognize unhealthy build of material for removal, you have to stall normal production. Otherwise production and removal would waste each other's efforts and pernicious build up would be undetectable. 2. Some cellular machinery may be used during normal and clean up operations, in different things. Evolution is great at reusing whatever is available. 3. Sleep involves coordinating many systems. Some subsystems might technically be capable of operating more flexibly, but coordinating all the systems together makes overall coordination simple, efficient and reliable. 4. Sleep isn't low energy behavior. Segmenting energy use between waking and sleeping maintains a lower metabolism envelope. 5. Dreaming is high level behavior. Can't high level think and dream at the same time. 6. Dreaming sensory free, motor free, operation is fundamentally at odds with normal active sensory and motor activity. 7. A billion random dependences on phase separation have accumulated over millennia, at the psychological, gene, epigenetic and chemical level, with no pre-ordaned rationale other than the separation was dependable for the other reasons given. Intersting that octopuses, whose brains are an entirely separate "alien" evolutionary invention, also appear to dream. [0] [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopuses-may-have-vivid-nightmares-video-suggests-180982248/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopuses-may-have...
- m463 2y agoI've read we rehearse things in our dreams. If we played tennis one day, we simulate playing tennis in our dreams that night, and the next day we are better at tennis. I also kind of wonder - does sleep have an evolutionary function to not move and not make noise during the night to patiently pass the time of night predators?
- yard2010 2y agoI can't remember where but I read somewhere a theory that says that most of life started sleeping, in the water, this was the default state. At one point in time stuff started being awake and developed wake consciousness, and the evolutionary pressure was on the wakefulness of things, because if one thing is awake everything has to be eventually. It made me think - why are we thinking our wake life is real life? When we're asleep - we're sure the dream world is the real world. It's like one life is not enough from an evolutionary standpoint. You have to have 2 lives, interconnected on 2 different dimensions, alternating day and night.
- edmundsauto 2y ago> When we're asleep - we're sure the dream world is the real world I don’t think this is true, or at least is not universally true. People often describe dreamlike states as being surreal or just off that we suspect we are in a dream. This is a common trope in movies.
- surfingdino 2y agoInteresting article. > (...) given the many potential benefits of dreaming for our waking life, maybe it’s not the sleep we really need, but the dreams. Waiting for the pot brigade to use that sentence as a conversation starter... We need sleep to recover physically. Like really need it. Anyone who has done physical exercise or just work and tried to rest in other ways will learn that sleep is the best way to rest.
- jajko 2y agoAlso body cleans up (if not sleeping on full stomach, big mistake of mine yesterday but those 400g steaks were expiring...)
- jackstraw14 2y agoPot brigade? I'm not sure what that means but nightly smokers aren't having many dreams.
- rkagerer 2y agoIf dreaming is the point, then my dog has mastered the skill. Until I met him I never considered dogs could dream so prolifically. I wish I could plug a TV into his brain and watch the reel running through it.
- moomoo11 2y agoSame with my cat. Every time I go to sleep it will always pick me to snuggle with usually in between my head and elbow. Within a few mins it’s purring and its limbs twitch and I get poked by claws. It’s in deep sleep and seems happy. I have some pretty wild dreams myself, and what’s wilder is that I have those dejavue (sp?) moments regularly irl.
- namanyayg 2y agoDejavue sounds like a great name for a new 2024 Frontend Framework™
- ohmyiv 2y agoIt's already the name of a visualization and debugging tool built for vue.js: https://github.com/MiCottOn/DejaVue https://github.com/MiCottOn/DejaVue
- vsnf 2y ago> it I don't think I could bear to call any of my pets, or even any familiar animal, by such a distant term.
- scanny 2y agoIn some languages , like German, children are referred to as “it” for quite some time as they grow
- ben_w 2y agoYes, but each language splits reality up differently, and with different implications. I've noticed several native German speakers, when using English, would say things like "I spilled coffee on my table and now he is wet" — I don't think they were asserting that the table was objectively male, just because it was grammatically male.
- FailMore 2y agoIn the article, the author writes: > Why devote this kind of energy to the creation of wildly imaginative and highly emotional nocturnal experiences for an audience of one? I think that this is a mistake. The audience size is greater than one. The author also writes that dreams “[give] us outrageous scenarios so we can better understand the everyday, serving as an overnight therapist”. I believe this is a multiplayer game. I am a psychotherapist (in training). When people report their dreams, they normally do not mention their own behaviour. However, when their behaviour is investigated it often looks odd given the “outrageous scenario” they are in. More specifically, the behaviour often reveals clear displays of their unconscious interpersonal anxieties that their waking symptomology only opaquely reveals. An example, might be someone who is “shy” when awake behaving in an outrageously passive way, when in a confrontation; a confrontation that their waking shyness - which might include symptoms which mean they avoid contact with others - would have meant that they would not have had. It is no surprise that people do not typically report their own behaviour within dreams, as that is the nature of unconscious beliefs - we think they are unremarkable and true. Often an outsider is required to notice that the behaviour is unusual given the “outrageous situation” - often the role of a therapist (who shares this theory on dreams). In the paper linked below, I outline many examples of this, and discuss the surprisingly specific supporting neurology: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz This paper was discussed on Hacker News previously. The link to that discussion is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
- FailMore 2y agoI also agree with those who say that sleep has multiple purposes. REM sleep typically starts four hours into a sleep cycle, after the “deep cleaning” work seems to be done. This would suggest that the brain is prioritising its basic functioning over the discovery of unconscious patterns, which is, I believe, a sensible trade-off. It is not imperative that we spot our unconscious patterns, though in the long run, it can make a big difference to our lives.
- tuumi 2y agoREM sleep takes place much sooner than 4 hours. It takes place at about 90 minutes of sleep. And, hopefully, the sleeper goes through several cycles throughout the night. I would be screwed if it took that long to get to REM as I wake up 4-5 times a night.
- Animats 2y agoDreaming may be when the weights get re-trained.
- silisili 2y agoThere's a decent hypothesis about the reason for dreaming, but it's a bit absurd to call it the whole point of sleep. As a person with severe insomnia, often going several days without sleep, you absolutely start breaking down without sleep. Brain zaps, hearing things, seeing things, etc. I've read people have even died in severe cases. So it feels like there's a medical necessity that's the whole point. Whether dreams are a neat side effect of said process or a purposeful side project of sorts is worthy of debate, however.
- pjerem 2y agoAre you sure about people dying from lack of sleep ? I read the opposite but I lack proof. To me sleeping is an essential "maintenance" of the body & the mind but that lack of sleep wouldn’t kill you in itself. However there is no doubt sleeping is essential to psychological and physical health. I also sometimes struggle with insomnia and I recommend reading "Why we sleep". It helped me understand sleep better than I would have thought and it actually helped me manage insomnia. The book is also actually really captivating which is a good thing given I thought I knew enough about sleep hygiene. I was so wrong.
- trishmapow2 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia
- cnity 2y agoThe causality of this condition is not the same. Prion issues cause both sleeplessness and death, which is not the same thing as sleep deprivation leading to death. Thanks for the link though, this is interesting.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vbezhenar 2y agoYes, creatures definitely die with sleep deprivation. Obviously you won't try that on humans, but for mices it's a known phenomena, they die quick enough. So sleep is necessary for basic body chemistry at least.
- tomohelix 2y agoA little thing I realize upon reading about all the brain study is how bad we are at reverse engineering a totally alien "computer". In popular media, human is often depicted as some super scavenger that can exploit and adapt alien technology to their own in a matter of 1-2 lifetimes. And yet here we are in reality, after thousands of years with abundant and intimate access to one of the most efficient and most capable information processor known to us, and we are still absolutely clueless about how it work. The closest thing we built to mimic it cost maybe a million times more energy and perform a fraction of the functions of the original one. So much for "reverse engineering".
- jl6 2y agoIf you are comparing the energy cost of LLMs, consider that the "training cost" of the human brain is the accumulated evolutionary activity of the last 4 billion years. Human inference is much more efficient though - we run at about 100 Watts[0], probably a lot less for the thinking alone. [0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/431522/humans-have-an-average-energy-budget-of-100-watts-but-the-power-radiated-from https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/431522/humans-ha...
- ben_w 2y agoGiven I can do token generation on a 30 watt laptop, the language/Joule part at least seems to be the computer winning. (Separate to any discussion about quality). Not so for images, as I can imagine visual scenes in what feels like real time, while even the fastest image generator I've seen was 200-300 ms at 512x512.
- vfinn 2y agoOne thing I believe is that the less you're involved in fantasy, the more realistic your dreams are. So if you're a simple, practical man without beliefs in supernatural, your dreams will be about daily life; but if you read fantasy and have superstitious beliefs and watch a lot of movies, you will have more complex and bizarre dreams. I mean, it's hard to dream about something you haven't encountered.
- lukan 2y ago"I mean, it's hard to dream about something you haven't encountered." I guess it is very hard to not encounter fantasy in daily life (though most of it is marketed as reality).
- vfinn 2y agoYes, I know what you mean, but you can say no to movies, social media, tv, and choose to live in the countryside for example (of course that depends on your financial situation and where you live). That alone makes a big difference.
- junto 2y agoI’ve always considered dreaming to be a daily disk defragmentation process where they bolted extreme Winamp visualizations on top to make it more interesting.
- Urgo 2y agoLooks like The Guardian may have had a typo (-sleepp) in their url, fixed it, and didn't redirect traffic from the typo to the new url. Either way here is the working url: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-what-if-dreaming-is-the-whole-point-of-sleep https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-w...
- blamazon 2y ago> The rational, executive network in the brain is switched off, and the imaginative, visual and emotional parts are dialled way up. As a result, the dreaming mind is given free rein in a way that has no parallel in our waking lives. We couldn’t think this way when we are awake even if we tried. I read this and felt compelled to say this reminds me of how psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin work :)
- huppeldepup 2y agoDreaming stopped for me after being put on Trazodone. In some the medication induces nightmares or vivid dreams, not for me. I can testify that dreams contribute a lot to the perceived quality of sleep. In recent months I've had a few very short dreams. They're dull, bland, nothing much happens. I feel robbed of a part of my life. I took Trazodone for about a year, now some 8 years ago.
- naveen99 2y agoWear an Apple Watch to bed. See if you are sleeping continuously and entering deep sleep or rem.
- dalmo3 2y agoWow, sorry to hear. I'm going to tattoo that name, so to remind me to never take it.
- giraffe_lady 2y agoIt's a pretty uncommon antidepressant, you usually only get it because you have some other stuff going on that prevents using the more mundane ones, or your depression is so bad you need a second one you can take over top of the SSRI. It also gets a lot of use in PTSD treatment. Basically no one wants to be on this drug. By the time they're offering it to you it's probably in your best interest to consider it.
- tuumi 2y agoInteresting. I take Trazadone to reduce the number of nightly awakenings. I still get up 3-4 times a night but at least that gives me the opportunity to make it through a sleep cycle without waking up.
- luxuryballs 2y ago2-3g of lions mane mushroom before bed greatly enhances dreams and vividness, also happens to be easier to wake up, a more refreshing sleep
- nextaccountic 2y agoLink is broken (has an extra p at the end, sleepp rather than sleep) and ends up in a page saying "Sorry – we haven’t been able to serve the page you asked for.", here is it fixed https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-what-if-dreaming-is-the-whole-point-of-sleep https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-w... @dang maybe you should fix the link?
- markhahn 2y agoGlymphatic drainage is the "point" (in the sense of "kill you if you don't do it"). And it's typical of evolution to use the behavior for several other purposes...
- bloppe 2y agoIf subjectively experiencing a dream were "the whole point" of sleep, that would make it pretty hard to explain why total sleep deprivation is fatal. Clearly there are far more important things going on physiologically during sleep. Can dreams be therapeutic? I'd wager that happens just about as often as they're psychologically harmful. And both of those outcomes are far less frequent than completely forgetting your dreams. A silly article.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]