81–90 of 134 posts
So by their theory blind people don't need to sleep? Total bullshit.
This doesn't explain why consistently interrupting REM sleep will lead to death. Also, the exposition suggests that this is somehow particularly necessary for visual information because we can't see while sleeping. They originally suggest that this is because it's dark at night, but later modify it to be because one's eyes are closed while sleeping. However, to my knowledge, very little hearing is done while one is s…
I’ve seen this claim many times, but I’ve not seen any studies that say “no [REM] sleep causes you to die”. The closest I can find are studies in the form “less [REM] sleep correlates with all causes of death to go up” - it’s not like you can literally kill someone just by keeping them awake for a month.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2020/study-links-poor-dream-s...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their theory says nothing about sleep, except that your visual cortex isn't receiving any input. You're making a mistake in conflating dreams and sleep.
You and they making a mistake saying that blind people should not see dreams. I wonder how such an idiotic idea reached the HN at all. It's Daily Mail level. People see dreams not every time they sleep, not every night, sometimes we can have multiple nights without dreams. By this moronic theory our “visual cortex” should be modified to “blind mode” just in the first night of sleep without dreams. Articles containing…
This idea ignores a fascinating aspect of REM sleep. During REM, the brain shuts down the executive functions, while the brain goes into extreme 'story generation mode'. A story in which you are a character. I think this is one of the most overlooked and interesting parts of dreaming. We are able to observe ourselves in our dreams acting without the constraints of our 'executive functioning' brain. This means we get…
The idea also doesn't ignore REM sleep like you claim.
> This means we get to learn about our purely emotional behaviour, and perhaps spot where it is maladaptive.
How did you get this ? Its another interpretation of available data. Extreme story generation mode may not be end goal but artifact.
This doesn't explain why consistently interrupting REM sleep will lead to death. Also, the exposition suggests that this is somehow particularly necessary for visual information because we can't see while sleeping. They originally suggest that this is because it's dark at night, but later modify it to be because one's eyes are closed while sleeping. However, to my knowledge, very little hearing is done while one is s…
> consistently interrupting REM sleep will lead to death. I’ve seen this claim many times, but I’ve not seen any studies that say “no [REM] sleep causes you to die”. The closest I can find are studies in the form “less [REM] sleep correlates with all causes of death to go up” - it’s not like you can literally kill someone just by keeping them awake for a month. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news/2020/study-links-poor-dre…
Without a good reference its just a repeated nonsense.
Even if this is true, there must be limits on it. What qualifies as 'interruption' ? Does REM taking 10ms counts as interrupted ? 100ms ? 1s ? 0ms (hard to believe this is actually possible). Its also known that some people require less sleep then others due to genetic factors. Perhaps 1m REM is enough for some...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course. Articles such as the "OP" are simplistic bollocks. For starters, you'd be completely blind by now if the article had any merit. And deaf. And lost all memory. Oh no, wait: we open our eyes every morning, so even if there was any effect, it would be the opposite: visual taking over everything else. Which also doesn't happen. So take it with a grain of salt: yet another unprovable "theory" about the brain.
Have you stopped to think for a second where science would be if every possible hypothesis was thrown out as soon as its inventor realized he couldn't conclusively prove it in a day? Also exactly the fact that it hasn't been fully proved out yet is why the nuance is missing. But now all the sudden you want them to be able to give you an explanation of the nuanced mechanism that prevents visual from taking over everyt…
2. The hypothesis is as unprovable as they come: not only do we not have any idea on how this process of taking over other brain areas would work, if you knew how it worked, you couldn't build brains that lack this mechanism but are identical for the rest, and set up an experiment in which half of the brains (modified and original) would dream and the rest wouldn't. Because that seems to be about the only experiment that could truly falsify this idea.
3. It doesn't explain why only the visual cortex is susceptible to this, when we know that other brain areas also can adapt. The argument "it's dark" doesn't cut the mustard, because the effect should go away as soon as we open our eyes, which is around 2/3rds of the day. BTW, babies can't see, so it's odd that so many of them manage to develop a normally functioning visual cortex.
4. Sleep inhibits the senses, so how can the areas they input to take over, and why don't their areas get taken over?
5. They don't even attempt to prove that REM sleep and REM sleep alone activates the visual cortex and only that.
> Make up your mind!
That was under the assumption that the hypothesis was true. It seems to lead to rather unintuitive predictions. And I do like a theory to not be in apparent contradiction with simple observations.
So no, I have no reason to take it seriously, and people that (think they) don't dream shouldn't worry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that's exactly what's described at the end of the article: > If dreams are visual hallucinations triggered by a lack of visual input, we might expect to find similar visual hallucinations in people who are slowly deprived of visual input while awake. In fact, this is precisely what happens in people with eye degeneration, patients confined to a tank-respirator, and prisoners in solitary confinement. In all of the…
And that's exactly my point :) Shouldn't this have happened to those blind people, too?
This doesn't explain why consistently interrupting REM sleep will lead to death. Also, the exposition suggests that this is somehow particularly necessary for visual information because we can't see while sleeping. They originally suggest that this is because it's dark at night, but later modify it to be because one's eyes are closed while sleeping. However, to my knowledge, very little hearing is done while one is s…
There can be a lot of reasons we sleep. Why do we have weekends?
This idea ignores a fascinating aspect of REM sleep. During REM, the brain shuts down the executive functions, while the brain goes into extreme 'story generation mode'. A story in which you are a character. I think this is one of the most overlooked and interesting parts of dreaming. We are able to observe ourselves in our dreams acting without the constraints of our 'executive functioning' brain. This means we get…
You sound like its a fact, while its just one interpretation. The idea also doesn't ignore REM sleep like you claim. > This means we get to learn about our purely emotional behaviour, and perhaps spot where it is maladaptive. How did you get this ? Its another interpretation of available data. Extreme story generation mode may not be end goal but artifact.