3 ms·
Fascinating. Does this relate to the speed of dreams? i.e. a "dream" might seem to have taken hours when in fact the REM sequence was on the order of seconds?
by _abattoir 12y ago
Fascinating. Does this relate to the speed of dreams? i.e. a "dream" might seem to have taken hours when in fact the REM sequence was on the order of seconds?
- GenerocUsername 12y agoAlmost certainly. In real time, the brain is processing all incoming stimulus. In a dream/imagined scenario, you are only processing as much as you your brain is pushing into the scenario. Your not collecting millions of photons via your eye and interpreting a ball as green, your brain just says "green ball" and moves on, allowing for much faster replays/dreams than real-world experience.
- chockablock 12y agoCould do--the phenomenon was first seen in sleeping animals. Replay during REM is probably at 1X speed, non-REM (aka slow wave sleep) is in the 10-20x range. The dreams you remember (long, emotionally involved) tend to happen in REM. Of course, we can't ask rats what they dreamt about, but the patterns in the neural activity are very specific (we can decode the rat's position with ~5cm accuracy, and during replay we see coherent trajectories through space that look just like real movement.) Also Hassabis knows this literature well--he has published work on decoding human memories in hippocampus from fMRI data and we talked shop about replay a long time ago. (Very thoughtful and friendly person FWIW).