Maybe telepathy/ESP is real, it’s just that we lose it soon after birth, or in early childhood, like eidetic memory. Or perhaps some people retain it longer - or some animals, hence all the mythical beasts.
Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
121–130 of 193 posts
Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It's not though, that's my point. Even in absolute terms, weight gain from growth in the first year is still more than any other time in the average person's life.
Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Putting on 6kg in a year is not that fast, people do sometimes gain weight faster than that in adulthood.
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Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Putting on 6kg in a year is not that fast, people do sometimes gain weight faster than that in adulthood.
I'm going by average weight gain from normal growth. But let's look at height instead then.
Average height at age 12: 59". At age 13: 62". 3" of growth.
At birth: 19". At one year: 29". 11" of growth.
Try matching that just by eating more.
(obviously, yes, it's easier for a small thing to grow than a large thing. But it's still crazy fast. Imagine being 50% taller in a year)
Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#125Something 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 think it is less relevant to Winning Ticket Hypothesis (in my opinion, the most important paper on deep learning theory in the last 5 years), but about architectures that work to some extend with random weights.
See "Weight Agnostic Neural Networks" (https://weightagnostic.github.io/):
> Inspired by precocial species in biology, we set out to search for neural net architectures that can already (sort of) perform various tasks even when they use random weight values.
Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#126Earlier 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.
I have a 10 week old baby right now, he can absolutely stand on his legs if you hold him steady - but yeah, he has absolutely zero clue what to do from there :P Also he's got a kick that you really need to watch out for, strong little dude.
Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#127Mice, of course, differ from humans in their ability to quickly navigate their environment soon after birth. However, human babies are also able to immediately detect objects and identify motion, such as a finger moving across their field of vision, suggesting that their visual system was also primed before birth.
Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is crazy fast training speed. Is it? If we ignore compute requirements, how long would a good algorithm take to learn something like balancing a quadrupedal robot, based on real-time feedback to its outputs? It is a simpler problem, but drone flight software based on learning, can re-learn how to fly a quadcopter after something like losing a propeller and a sudden shift in weight distribution, in a few second…
> Is it? If we ignore compute requirements, how long would a good algorithm take to learn something like balancing a quadrupedal robot Seems easy but why don't we have self driving cars by now? Walking it not just a mechanical task. Your quadcopter is not learning to interpret raw electrical signals from an IMS and raw electrical signals from a CMOS sensor. The training is also probably done in a simulator, where if…
We do have self-driving cars we just don't have any we think are good enough, well-tested, and adaptable to mixed-use driving and our various regulatory and safety and cultural needs. You can't get regulatory approval for a car that learns to drive by guided trial and error in the wild -- which is the most direct way of training such a thing. Feedback on what you shouldn't drive over also isn't as immediate and unambiguous, compared to whether gravity will topple it over.
Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#129I'm sure there is brain activity that prepares the baby for birth, but calling it a "dream" is just clickbait
The researchers call it "dream-like" and it is, in the sense that, like a dream, the neurons are stimulated and activated as though sensory input was occurring despite there being no actual stimuli.
Foetus can have, and will have, direct experience of the world before birth. In the last months of pregnancy they definitely can hear what is happening outside. Will also react to strong noises or gentle pressure.
Seeing differences at daylight or obscurity while in the womb does not seem impossible. Anybody that has closed the fist over a strong flashlight knows that the flesh is not totally opaque.
Is this dreaming? Maybe, maybe not. Other explanations are possible.
Re: Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born
#130Earlier 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…
> 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…
> 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 would otherwise be overrun (leading to both maternal and infant death). Based on this, the increased energy demands of our larger brains mean that we have to sacrifice neonatal motor skills or drastically improve the metabolic efficiency of adult women.
This seems weird. Fully breastfed babies require even more calories from the mother. (They are bigger than unborn babies, and they lose more heat.)