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Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

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Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#91

Post by UnFleshedOne »

gota wrote: post #45
gojomo wrote: post #12

Something about this reminds me of the 'Winning Ticket Hypothesis' in artifical neural networks: that some 'random' initializations prime a network far better for later faster learning. From https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635 - the abstract: Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of infere…

I guess I can see some parallel the way you describe it, but it is not that tight of an analogy IMO. Correct me if I'm wrong but the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis mainly means that, for many of our tasks, we start with needlessly huge networks, and thus a good portion of the learning process is just the network learning to "cope with the noise" from the extraneous connections Hence why the lottery ticket network (being a…

> Also - the baby brain is not really a 'pruned', smaller version of the adult brain, right

I think it is the other way around -- adult brain is a physically pruned version of baby brain. We start with lots of connections from everywhere to wherever and then lose a lot of them as we learn, while strengthening useful ones.

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#92

Post by raverbashing »

teruakohatu wrote: post #17
gojomo wrote: post #12

Something about this reminds me of the 'Winning Ticket Hypothesis' in artifical neural networks: that some 'random' initializations prime a network far better for later faster learning. From https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635 - the abstract: Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of infere…

> Are these innate patterns of activity priming mammalian brains in a similar way? A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form of transfer learning? Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have immature brains that cannot…

> A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form of transfer learning?

Or maybe having 4 legs (as a foal) gives more natural balance than a human or maybe even a cat or dog.

In the same way technically you only need one leg to walk (hop) around but that's much more difficult than having two.

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#93

Post by UnFleshedOne »

Geee wrote: post #88

Is it possible that there's some kind of neural transfer from the mother's brain during pregnancy? I've been wondering if there is or if it's all genetic. Evolutionary it would be very interesting if consciousness wasn't genetic, but transferred during pregnancy.

Parent organisms do influence the way their children develop, at what extent is a different question (I understand it is fractal spaghetti all the way down).

It seems planaria worms can do something like that [0].

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5051648/

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#95

Post by guerrilla »

vmception wrote: post #10
darepublic wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and just like software it doesn't matter the test results were still going live

To the host it can matter

I think you missed the point: they're going to be born and have to deal with reality in any case. There would be no possible consequence of a failed unit test.

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#96

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

teruakohatu wrote: post #17
gojomo wrote: post #12

Something about this reminds me of the 'Winning Ticket Hypothesis' in artifical neural networks: that some 'random' initializations prime a network far better for later faster learning. From https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635 - the abstract: Neural network pruning techniques can reduce the parameter counts of trained networks by over 90%, decreasing storage requirements and improving computational performance of infere…

> Are these innate patterns of activity priming mammalian brains in a similar way? A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form of transfer learning? Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have immature brains that cannot…

> I have wondered about how true this is.

It isn't. Human babies prioritize differently. We learn to understand language and to communicate before we learn to walk.

(In fact, for many babies learning to walk is a conscious process. We learn to learn before we learn to walk.)

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#97

Post by KronisLV »

raverbashing wrote: post #92
teruakohatu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are these innate patterns of activity priming mammalian brains in a similar way? A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form of transfer learning? Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have immature brains that cannot…

> A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form of transfer learning? Or maybe having 4 legs (as a foal) gives more natural balance than a human or maybe even a cat or dog. In the same way technically you only need one leg to walk (hop) around but that's much more difficult than having tw…

That's a fair point!

However, another commenter brought up the fact that human muscles are somewhat underdeveloped after birth. It might make sense that having 4 legs is easier both in regards to balance, as well as because the load per leg decreases to make standing on them easier.

That is probably not the only reason, but probably a contributing factor.

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#98

Post by jacobolus »

danielheath wrote: post #76
chrisseaton wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have immature brains Have you ever seen a new-born baby's legs? They aren't even remotely strong enough to walk, no matter what the brain tells them. It takes those months to develop leg muscles. New-borns don't have them. It's absolutely not restricted by the brain size.

I’ve seen a 2mo with the leg strength required. If you balanced them they would hold themselves up, no problem. The balance comes much later than the strength.

The balance can also be trained relatively quickly, but newborns typically get very little practice.

If you start occasionally holding your baby up by the thighs when they are 4–5 months old (their back/abdomen muscles at that point are typically plenty strong), after about a month they will have the balance to hold their torso upright when sitting on an adult’s shoulders, for at least a while. By age 8–9 months they will be very stable and good at balancing for long stretches of time. (I recommend any new parent try this, not only for the baby’s sake but because carrying a baby on shoulders is dramatically less tiring for an adult than carrying a baby in arms, and less hassle than a stroller or baby carrier.)

People generally hold their babies from the top (e.g. with hands in armpits), in a way that they are passively stable. If you want to train someone’s balance, you want to force them to actively stabilize themselves from a default-unstable position at least a bit every day. Babies have very short torsos and small heads compared to older kids, with the effect that their torsos have a much smaller moment of inertia about the waist: it takes several times more muscle strength for a 3-year-old to lift their torso up.

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#99

Post by techrat »

Nition wrote: post #77
jacinda wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have immature brains that cannot mature due to birth canal constraints, which is constrained by pelvis size which is constrained by the need to walk upright Interestingly, the EGG hypothesis postulates that the constraining factor is not pelvis size, but rather that neonates consume so much energy that we give birth just before a women's metabolic limits wou…

> Instead, the mother delivers and the neonate’s growth rate slows relative to its fetal growth rate. Worth noting how massive the growth rate is I think: Even after birth, the baby gains weight faster than it ever will again in its life. In absolute terms! In relative terms it's even more insane. A 12-year-old boy going through puberty will go from 90lb to 100lb over a year, an increase of 10lb or ~10%. The average…

Diminishing returns as the numbers of scale increase.

The growth might seem impressive when you do percentages of a very small number, but it's still a very small number overall.

Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

#100

Post by [deleted] »

underwater wrote: post #55
throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that children can walk with assistance (and crawl) before they're strong enough to walk on their own.

Interestingly they can also effectively communicate well before they can vocalise words. A baby can sign reliably at 7-9 months but typically won't be able to speak until 12 months.

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