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New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

newyorker.com

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Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#111

Post by mr-wendel »

I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access.

I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.

While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.

Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#112

Post by 8note »

MITSardine wrote: post #88
ml_basics wrote: post #33

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems. For me this a big eye opener about the impor…

In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it. I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeating this to me.

im english, there's "sleep on it"

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#113

Post by irishcoffee »

This happens to me both sleeping and awake. When I’m stuck on a problem and decide to walk away from it for a while, I subconsciously spin off a thread in my mind and move on to something else. The number of times I’ve had a eureka moment 3-5 hours later (not realizing I was even percolating on it) has to be in the hundreds.

Happens probably twice a week when I sleep on the problem as well.

To parlay this back to the current LLM craze, if we just export all our problems to some fuzzy non deterministic solver without ever trying to understand the problem, our collective brains will atrophy severely.

I use the LLM my work pays for, sparingly, because I refuse to let that atrophy occur.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#114

Post by rokhayakebe »

ml_basics wrote: post #33

During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems. For me this a big eye opener about the impor…

"Sleep on it?"

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#117

Post by aeternum »

pedalpete wrote: post #96
vanviegen wrote: post #63

I once solved a particularly nasty bug, causing a c++ server to segfault in production about once a week, in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up, and I rushed to my laptop to find the insight was real. I had been trying to comprehend that segfault for several long days. It wasn't the most restful night though.

I used to do this regularly when I first started coding, I called them "Codemares". They were like nightmares with the shouting of commands I didn't quite understand would invade my dreams.

It seems to me that this is the purpose of nightmares. I especially noticed this after having kids. They are not by default scared of snakes and such but if they see a nature documentary of a snake biting something or even a cartoon bad guy, it's enough to trigger bad dreams which reinforce the fear and it's far stronger the next day.

IMO this is under-appreciated in current AI models. RL is not very effective in avoiding crocodiles for example, by the time like 5 of your tribe-mates are eaten it's far too late. You need some mechanism that ensures the danger is learned after just a single incident.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#118

Post by azan_ »

orthecreedence wrote: post #78
azan_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest you should drop the patronizing tone. People believe lots of things and a lot of them is completely bogus. That's why we need people in lab coats to evaluate them in systematic way.

[flagged]

No problem, hit me up for an advice any other time you will be tempted to post stupid bullshit, glad I could help!

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#119

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bnreed wrote: post #57
chrz wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but but, you can do whatever you want?

I've had limited experience (n~20) but no... that's not how it worked for me, interested in others' experiences. "flying" was limited. I didn't have full control and sometimes felt dynamically pinned to the top of a 2D scrolling video game as if there were driver incompatabilities. drifting off to sleep in a session, it was very disturbing- i felt like i was being dragged by my ankle across the bed before lucid dream…

> I'm with a group of people who can't answer a very obvious question ("why is the sky blue?")

Super interesting, because I have the same thing. Also none of my technology works. I usually try to do something on my phone a few times, fail because the UI is putty, and then remember that smartphones don’t work in my dreams.

Re: New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

#120

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mynameisash wrote: post #79
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sort of just happened to me a few years ago. It’s neat—flying is fun. (As is the opposite, when it just doesn’t work and I wake up sort of laughing at myself for having spent, presumably, hours jumping around in my dream.) But at least for me, the price was dreams, the moment I go lucid, ceasing to be self directed. I get that I’m in a movie, and I have to always create the next step. Nothing surprises or horrifie…

My wife and I were just talking about this the other day. She lucid dreams very regularly, and she says she spends a lot of that time flying. I, on the other hand, never lucid dreamed, so a few years ago, I spent a lot of time journaling and doing wakefulness tests to see if I could learn to do it. One night, I did -- I was dreaming and then had an 'awakening' in which I realized I was asleep. Finally, a lucid dream!…

> Wait a sec... People can't fly." That took the wind out of my sails, so to speak, and I couldn't fly again in the dream

There is a Peter Pan tendency, at least to my dreams. You know you can’t fly. But then you remember you have, and believing it’s true makes it happens.

That’s what I was getting at with the film-script effect. I’ll be in a bind and then realize that there “must” be a solution in a particular form, otherwise the dream wouldn’t make sense, and that sort of conjures that thing into existence.

Maybe fortunately, maybe sadly, the one thing I’ve not been able to do is conjure up lost loved ones. I’ll get a bunch of puppies who know my dog, but he just couldn’t show up, or I’ll get strangers or living loved ones who know my grandmother or best friend; they’re just constantly indisposed.

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