See Carlos Casteneda and "assembling the self."
Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
91–100 of 100 posts
Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can now formulate falsifiable theories and test them. Science was still pretty immature in the 19th century in that it wasn't always possible to crisply state theories in ways that give rise to testable predictions. Doesn't that still hold true today with string theory and social sciences?
AFAIK string theory hasn't made any testable predictions beyond the standard model, but the standard model itself does have testable predictions that have so far all held up. So string theory is just as falsifiable as the standard model. I don't know about the social sciences. That's painting with a pretty broad brush, IMHO.
True, and I was bit tongue-in-cheek as a social scientist myself. Replicability of many studies is a long-standing issue.
Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#93This reminds me of dropout regularization - the key idea there is to randomly turn off units during training.
You're on to something!
Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this obsession with the "purpose" of dreaming. As far as I have experienced its just noise on the wire that we sometimes are conscious enough to recognize. Having spent enough time in extremely sleep-deprived states for projects recently, I've experienced firsthand a lot of funky stuff going on (e.g. falling asleep and waking up with a full page of class notes in front of me, or realizing that I've…
I have never experienced this. How sleep-deprived do you have to be before you start dreaming while editing a document?
It seems to happen while sitting down doing repetitive editing after ~40 hours wakefulness after a short night of sleep.
I'm also looking into evidence that a blood sugar deficit may have been involved. Reportedly some of the techniques used to maintain alertness can result in increased glucose metabolism coupled with the unfortunate side effect of having zero appetite.
Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this obsession with the "purpose" of dreaming. As far as I have experienced its just noise on the wire that we sometimes are conscious enough to recognize. Having spent enough time in extremely sleep-deprived states for projects recently, I've experienced firsthand a lot of funky stuff going on (e.g. falling asleep and waking up with a full page of class notes in front of me, or realizing that I've…
> As far as I have experienced its just noise on the wire that we sometimes are conscious enough to recognize. If it was actual noise it would have absolute minimal statistical chance of having any coherent structure.
Noise 'on the wire' in a neural network is going to look different from noise on an actual copper wire.
E.g. noise in the brain might be an increased incidence of errant impulses/signals. There's evidence that sleep involves pruning meaningless connections - noise in this case might mean signals propagating farther than they ought.
Noise was meant in an abstract way, not statistically random noise you see in physical circuits.
Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The brain is a series of tubes.
I just the other day got … a thought that was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Brain commercially ... They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Brain. The brain is not just something you dump things on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those…
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Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have never experienced this. How sleep-deprived do you have to be before you start dreaming while editing a document?
For me at least, it seems to depend on why I'm sleep deprived and what I'm doing. I spent 100 hours straight through working on my dissertation (only breaks to go fetch food etc.), and felt fine for the entire period - no fatigue, no noticeable cognitive effects, I was alert and coherent - right up until I stopped writing. Then it all just hit me all at once - speaking coherently was a challenge, there was an afterim…
That's amazing to me. I haven't been over 20 hours without sleep for several years, before that I think the max I did was about 35-40 hours which was enough to almost make me hallucinate. I guess I could go for longer, but at that point the only thing I want to do is sleep, any other life goals suddenly become distant second in importance.
Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As far as I have experienced its just noise on the wire that we sometimes are conscious enough to recognize. If it was actual noise it would have absolute minimal statistical chance of having any coherent structure.
Actual noise with no coherent structure is enough for the brain to start imagining patterns - can confirm that having tried it myself, with white noise in my eyes and ears for half an hour, I ended up having dream-like hallucinations while awake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganzfeld_effect
I want to say, pyramidal cell in visual cortex connectivity network decoherence - similar happens with mice after sleep deprivation, and is reminiscent of the phenomenon of HPPD, and with stochastic resonance.
Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me at least, it seems to depend on why I'm sleep deprived and what I'm doing. I spent 100 hours straight through working on my dissertation (only breaks to go fetch food etc.), and felt fine for the entire period - no fatigue, no noticeable cognitive effects, I was alert and coherent - right up until I stopped writing. Then it all just hit me all at once - speaking coherently was a challenge, there was an afterim…
That's amazing to me. I haven't been over 20 hours without sleep for several years, before that I think the max I did was about 35-40 hours which was enough to almost make me hallucinate. I guess I could go for longer, but at that point the only thing I want to do is sleep, any other life goals suddenly become distant second in importance.
It's certainly not something I'd recommend doing (I've had a couple of occasions where I've been up 40ish hours and started to notice the visual disturbances, so it can definitely come on sooner).
The dissertation was partly very poor planning on my part, but I also stumbled on a doctoral thesis that more or less disproved the central tech. behind my dissertation less than a week before the final deadline, which gave me two options:
A) finish up what I'd done, knowing it was fundamentally flawed and that I'd never be able to defend it if called for a viva voce (unlikely, but a definite possibility)
B) rewrite pretty much the entire thing (~30k words) to take a different approach, re-implement the hardware (audio filtering; didn't help that the spec. sheet lied to me and said it had an FPU but actually just emulating floating-point in software which was unusable slow), and come up with a convincing conclusion explaining why a year-long project produced nothing particularly useful.
I went with B, hence the 100 hours of solid work, and it went OK (mark was a marginal pass, but a pass nonetheless), but I'd hate to do it again. It took me 3 or 4 days to start feeling normal and alert again, despite sleeping 18 hours after crashing once it was finished.
The current insomnia is really weird though. I saw my GP this morning, took a fairly hefty dose of sleeping aids (15mg diazepam on top of the 20mg tamazepam and 75mg promethazine I was already prescribed[1]), yet somehow feel more awake than before taking those, despite the fact I'm only about three hours away from having had less than than an hour sleep total in the last six days. Honestly, I just feel bored more than anything at this point (hence this somewhat unnecessarily long post :p) - I don't have the physical energy to do a great deal, but mentally I feel more or less normal (though I suspect when I finally do get some sleep, it'll catch up with me and I'll have a rouge couple of days).
[1] FWIW, I've also got Zopiclone, but I saving that as a dug of last resort. The benzodiazepines cause me no side effects, but last time I used the Zopiclone it was rather unpleasant - it caused mild hallucinations (my room looked like it was bathed in a lemon-yellow light, despite it being the dead of night and no lights were on), and it had a strong amnesiac effect (my memory of the night pretty much goes "I'm in bed, why is everything yellow?", "I'm in the bathroom, how did I get here?", "I'm back in bed, but it's three hours later", and I have literally no idea what happened between each thought. It's just like a jump cut in a movie - there isn't even a hazy memory of I did something; it literally just goes from being in one room to being in other, despite there obviously being a chuck of time missing. It's pretty disconcerting).
Re: Portions of the brain fall asleep and wake back up all the time
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think that explanation has much content. Mangled data with structure are not noise -- at worse they contain some noise (like a dirty dataset).
Consider a c struct describing a circle, with fields for position, radius, and color. Imagine you have a buffer full of random noise, and you cast it to an array of said structure. You then render the array to a screen, you'll get a bunch of randomly placed colorful circles, rather than a bunch of visual noise.
That is exactly why we study sleep.
We examine the circles not to learn about the data from which those circles are derived, but rather to learn about which structs and other properties are defined in the system. We might find circle struts, square structs, triangle structs, but never spheres, boxes, or pyramids. Or maybe some people (schizophrenics) have the metaphorical three dimensional structs and others do not.