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The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

cell.com

11–20 of 83 posts

Re: The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

#11

All I know is my dog sometimes yips in his sleep, and it can be fairly loud-- I will forever wonder what he's yipping at, or how that behavior could possibly be selected for. Brains are weird.

I noticed mine seems to have vivid dreams with barking after being woken up at night. Interestingly, the paper claims:

> It is notable that approximately 50% to 70% of the time subjects report having a dream upon a sudden waking during sleep.

Re: The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

#16
post #14

Oh wow. Cell. Please also see previous dicussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23956715 I vaguely remember an Indian Paper (or an author with an Indian name) that made the same claims and it got destroyed on HN. But my memory may fail me.

It's Cell Patterns, a new open access journal from Cell Press that started in April 2021.

Re: The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

#17

All I know is my dog sometimes yips in his sleep, and it can be fairly loud-- I will forever wonder what he's yipping at, or how that behavior could possibly be selected for. Brains are weird.

Dogs and their ancestor's wolves are pack animals, maybe the sleep barking wakes the other pack mates making them more aware of their surroundings and better able to defend the pack from threats during the night? Maybe even The barking itself helps to ward off threats that would otherwise attack a sleeping animal.

Is there even anything that preys enough on wolves where enough of them are being killed by it that the sleep barking would be selected against?

Re: The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization

#20
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a sleeping disorder and if I wake up and remember having a dream I almost always also feel well rested.

I remember 1-3 dreams every night. All my dreams are vivid dreams, where I know they are dreams while they are happening and I even have some degree of control over the content.

Those are "lucid dreams". My experience is that lucid dreams do lead to you be tired, probably because we tends to wake up after lucid dreams, though we wake up momentarily in normal life too, we just don't remember it.

Maybe lucid dreaming overrides the benefits of sleep since the mind is actively engaged again.

It's all fascinating, and there are no real answers whatsoever.

Also, side questions:

1. Is your working memory pretty good? What about your IQ? 2. How vivid are these dreams and how logically-sequential are they? I.e. can you remember a clear chain of events from the dream?

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