What if dreaming is the whole point of sleep?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
In popular media, human is often depicted as some super scavenger that can exploit and adapt alien technology to their own in a matter of 1-2 lifetimes. And yet here we are in reality, after thousands of years with abundant and intimate access to one of the most efficient and most capable information processor known to us, and we are still absolutely clueless about how it work.
The closest thing we built to mimic it cost maybe a million times more energy and perform a fraction of the functions of the original one. So much for "reverse engineering".
Human inference is much more efficient though - we run at about 100 Watts[0], probably a lot less for the thinking alone.
[0] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/431522/humans-ha...
Not so for images, as I can imagine visual scenes in what feels like real time, while even the fastest image generator I've seen was 200-300 ms at 512x512.
This may not be the resolution we perceive as we imagine, but perception involves many additional systems and bottlenecks (notably, one can train oneself to have a more acute imagination, and there are people who report their imagination to be as acute as their vision).
Although I guess you could use one rock fall to generate A LOT of tokens if you don't use keyboard, but just use the variance data from falling rock to generate many tokens at once.
Odours are a thing I can't "visualise", and those are usually entirely absent from my dreams.
But those 30 watts on the laptop also cover the screen, hard drive, wifi, etc.
If you want to count the brain alone, then it must be compared with just the silicon alone; if you want to count the whole body, then it must be compared with the whole machine.
Maybe fair when we have bipedal robots doing work for us.
If the question is "I want to get this much mental stuff done", then you need the brain and the cost of keeping the brain alive and connected to the outside world — which for a human brain is the body, and for a silicon "brain" the computer/network.
If you want a humanoid robot to do be a drop-in replacement for human labourers in all professions, then sure (modulo the open question of how much brain power all our jobs actually require) a whole robot body has to be ready and you need to compare that body to our body.
If you want a special purpose machine that fully automates one specific product line but doesn't need to move, the "brain" might just be punched cards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine
Well the computers/CPUs haven't been evolving for a few million years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_human_evolution); let's assume from Mammals onwards.
If a CPU has been developed so much within a few decades, then with the capabilities provided on ML/LLM/AI/and other-such-acronyms, in a million years we should at least have a "Lucy" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2872732/) evolved. In the meantime, I expect that in a few hundred years we will have a Borg Queen (perhaps without the interconnectivity).
I doubt we would have similar ethics concerns with a non-sapient alien computer, though we might have a more limited number of examples.
And regardless, vivisection is pretty obviously more painful and less ethical than culling.
Biological systems, _solve_ real problems. They adapt. That's very much engineering in my opinion.
That most of our engineering is designed to be understood is just a side effect of how humans do things, not an inherent property.
There is some recent research that some chemicals are flushed through the brain during sleep to remove byproducts. Why that can't happen without sleep is another interesting question.
It was also dangerous to do anything i.r.o nocturnal predators.
What is it about external inputs that makes the brain not be able to do it's sleep "duties"? Is it that external inputs take up processing power that needs to be used during sleep instead?
I would guess that since sleep has been optimized by evolution for a long time, and evolution is so creative, that there are now countless dependencies on that time/phase separation.
But umbrella reasons probably include all of these:
1. To recognize unhealthy build of material for removal, you have to stall normal production. Otherwise production and removal would waste each other's efforts and pernicious build up would be undetectable.
2. Some cellular machinery may be used during normal and clean up operations, in different things. Evolution is great at reusing whatever is available.
3. Sleep involves coordinating many systems. Some subsystems might technically be capable of operating more flexibly, but coordinating all the systems together makes overall coordination simple, efficient and reliable.
4. Sleep isn't low energy behavior. Segmenting energy use between waking and sleeping maintains a lower metabolism envelope.
5. Dreaming is high level behavior. Can't high level think and dream at the same time.
6. Dreaming sensory free, motor free, operation is fundamentally at odds with normal active sensory and motor activity.
7. A billion random dependences on phase separation have accumulated over millennia, at the psychological, gene, epigenetic and chemical level, with no pre-ordaned rationale other than the separation was dependable for the other reasons given.
Intersting that octopuses, whose brains are an entirely separate "alien" evolutionary invention, also appear to dream. [0]
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/octopuses-may-have...
> Why devote this kind of energy to the creation of wildly imaginative and highly emotional nocturnal experiences for an audience of one?
I think that this is a mistake. The audience size is greater than one.
The author also writes that dreams “[give] us outrageous scenarios so we can better understand the everyday, serving as an overnight therapist”. I believe this is a multiplayer game.
I am a psychotherapist (in training). When people report their dreams, they normally do not mention their own behaviour. However, when their behaviour is investigated it often looks odd given the “outrageous scenario” they are in. More specifically, the behaviour often reveals clear displays of their unconscious interpersonal anxieties that their waking symptomology only opaquely reveals. An example, might be someone who is “shy” when awake behaving in an outrageously passive way, when in a confrontation; a confrontation that their waking shyness - which might include symptoms which mean they avoid contact with others - would have meant that they would not have had. It is no surprise that people do not typically report their own behaviour within dreams, as that is the nature of unconscious beliefs - we think they are unremarkable and true. Often an outsider is required to notice that the behaviour is unusual given the “outrageous situation” - often the role of a therapist (who shares this theory on dreams).
In the paper linked below, I outline many examples of this, and discuss the surprisingly specific supporting neurology:
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz
This paper was discussed on Hacker News previously. The link to that discussion is:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Sl...
You are exhausted, not relaxed, after a lucid dream. And you always need a second sleep session with REM sleep after that.
But you make a lot of progress on internal reflections, because your subconciousness fills in the emotional blind spots your alter ego cannot grasp (yet). I think that's why a lot of people in lucid dreams can relate so much with the 2 systems theory of Daniel Kaneman, and why there's so much debate about it.
I read this and felt compelled to say this reminds me of how psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin work :)
As a person with severe insomnia, often going several days without sleep, you absolutely start breaking down without sleep. Brain zaps, hearing things, seeing things, etc. I've read people have even died in severe cases.
So it feels like there's a medical necessity that's the whole point. Whether dreams are a neat side effect of said process or a purposeful side project of sorts is worthy of debate, however.
However there is no doubt sleeping is essential to psychological and physical health.
I also sometimes struggle with insomnia and I recommend reading "Why we sleep". It helped me understand sleep better than I would have thought and it actually helped me manage insomnia. The book is also actually really captivating which is a good thing given I thought I knew enough about sleep hygiene. I was so wrong.
What the hell were their bodies doing?
One particular anecdote that I've read described in detail was how during the worst days of the Stalinist Soviet state, the NKVD (predecessor to the KGB but much more brutal and lethal) in its obsession to get signed confessions from arrested prisoners, would put them on what was commonly called the "conveyer belt"
Solzhenitsyn described it graphically in his book as a process by which a prisoner would be interrogated in turns by an unbroken chain of well-rested NKVD interrogators whose added-together job was to never once let that victim sleep.
This was described as killing many of these people within a month or less even though they were fed and given water (sometimes even by force with tubes down their throats, since the point was breaking them, not killing them directly through starvation or thirst). In some cases there were of course also severe beatings and other tortures that could have easily been partial causes of death, but I remember the author describing cases where victims' hearts would finally stop as they descended into slow madness even if they weren't beaten at all over the course of those sleepless weeks.
Extreme sleep deprivation can kill, i'm sure of it.
Sometimes I only get by on power naps and those power naps are pretty good too.
Whatever is going on, whatever I was doing or not doing. I would (try to) sleep in a random field without any "need xyz for 3+ days (other than water and a multivitamin, fasting)" even if it's prescription or life assumption whatever. Just to see. Just to sleep.
Unexpected and unnoticed things can dramatically effect sleep.
I wish I could plug a TV into his brain and watch the reel running through it.
I have some pretty wild dreams myself, and what’s wilder is that I have those dejavue (sp?) moments regularly irl.
I don't think I could bear to call any of my pets, or even any familiar animal, by such a distant term.
I've noticed several native German speakers, when using English, would say things like "I spilled coffee on my table and now he is wet" — I don't think they were asserting that the table was objectively male, just because it was grammatically male.
The last thing you would do is to interrupt this moment of happiness.
(Off topic : dogs are so good)
But going for the most likely explanation, surely dogs can dream. They are also mammals, have quite similar brains and act similar in sleeping from the outside, so why shouldn't it be dreaming?
The verbal reports are key to our shared understanding that most humans experience dreams when sleeping. We do not have this for dogs or any other species.
> (...) given the many potential benefits of dreaming for our waking life, maybe it’s not the sleep we really need, but the dreams.
Waiting for the pot brigade to use that sentence as a conversation starter...
We need sleep to recover physically. Like really need it. Anyone who has done physical exercise or just work and tried to rest in other ways will learn that sleep is the best way to rest.
Can dreams be therapeutic? I'd wager that happens just about as often as they're psychologically harmful. And both of those outcomes are far less frequent than completely forgetting your dreams.
A silly article.
I also kind of wonder - does sleep have an evolutionary function to not move and not make noise during the night to patiently pass the time of night predators?
At one point in time stuff started being awake and developed wake consciousness, and the evolutionary pressure was on the wakefulness of things, because if one thing is awake everything has to be eventually.
It made me think - why are we thinking our wake life is real life? When we're asleep - we're sure the dream world is the real world.
It's like one life is not enough from an evolutionary standpoint. You have to have 2 lives, interconnected on 2 different dimensions, alternating day and night.
I don’t think this is true, or at least is not universally true. People often describe dreamlike states as being surreal or just off that we suspect we are in a dream. This is a common trope in movies.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-w...
@dang maybe you should fix the link?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/22/the-big-idea-w...
I guess it is very hard to not encounter fantasy in daily life (though most of it is marketed as reality).
Basically no one wants to be on this drug. By the time they're offering it to you it's probably in your best interest to consider it.
And it's typical of evolution to use the behavior for several other purposes...
I mean seriously if dreams do a necessary function for the human brain, doesn't it mean that AI and LLMs should benefit from dreaming as well?
Further, the longer a dendrite stays connected, the more optimized it becomes (myelin sheathing aka “white matter”) and then it doesn’t go away even if it becomes unused. It probably (helps) explains why we fall back on old habits so easily, even if we’ve avoided them for years.
There are inhibitory neurons that attach to other neurons and prevent them from firing. These neurons literally hug other neurons to prevent them from firing, which has the effect you're wanting but may not have the desired macro effect as there may be ways to still fire the neuron (not enough inhibition, or other brain chemicals like cortisol -- stress -- might prevent it from being fully inhibited). Further, the brain mostly works on creating more efficient pathways vs. inhibiting. If a behavior previously existed, life tends to suggest that it was important at some point and may be important at another point.
For example, my muscle memory for some activities still exists from being in the military. I will still annihilate entire teams in a game of paintball (which is pretty much the only place these skills are still useful, short of returning to a warzone).
Another example is that parts of your brain are dedicated to recognizing everyone you ever knew. Short of them dying or moving away, eventually, you may run into them again.