Your brain makes decisions while you sleep
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The similarities with FPGAs/ASICs are really quite interesting.
Now, granted, we do fall in and out of stages of deep and less-deep sleep throughout the night, however in my experience I have definitely been woken out of deep sleep by an usual sound or light (although it seems like it takes less from a less-deep sleep to wake you).
I bought a package of 400 small black sticky "dots" for the sole purpose of conquering bright blue leds... (Search for "sticky dots" on Amazon)
I wonder if it is an attempt to keep me awake, or if it is some sort of partial dreaming.
FPGAs are essentially the exact same thing as neuronal systems, but in silicon.
You have voltage-gated transponders with a slight delay. These transponders can have their output connected to one or more neighbors in such a way as to form arbitrary circuits.
A neuron isn't quite as capable as a LUT, but en masse they can do basically the same things.
I think it's very likely that the first strong AIs will be built in reprogrammable logic of some kind (possibly FPGAs).
I used to joke that my ears were like a wake-on-packet NIC card :-)
I think you accidentally a word. Your subconscious must not have written that sentence... :-)
Sometimes there's something in our mind that interferes with clear thinking. Sleep cleans that something, that could be simply trying too hard.
While you're floating, you don't feel like you're actively processing everything that's going on around you as you do in a normal environment where all senses are available to you. While floating, it feels like you're spectating your mind as it processes things.
So when you shut off all your senses and let go, you enter this observation mode where information is being processed but it doesn't feel like you are doing it. It seems like the same thing is happening while we sleep only we're not as lucid.
I'm interested to see if others have had similar experiences.
Sort of eerie. (No, I don't hear voices when I'm not listening to white noise).
you become 'the witness' more clearly than usual, but such is always the case...instead of being 'trapped' in your ego/limited rationalmindstressedbodyunawarespirit, you are 'shifted' to your pure expanded enlightened spirit true being
The main thesis is that the subconscious is a machine for doing things. Like a machine, it only reacts to data. It makes no judgement calls on the data. The goal of a person is to use their conscious mind to filter the information the doing machine gets. It was one of the first cognitive behavioral therapy books.
The book advocates sleeping on it for the reason given. The mind will process the data and come to a conclusion. The trick is to managing the data to get a good conclusion.
I started off by decoupling programming from analysis, doing each at a different time in a different place. This led to doing analysis at bed time. I may not have figured things out that night, but invariably, elegant solutions "came to me" in the next day or two.
I have talked about this many times here. My earliest comment:
Kouider, S., Andrillon, T., Barbosa, L. S., Goupil, L., & Bekinschtein, T. A. (2014). Inducing Task-Relevant Responses to Speech in the Sleeping Brain. Current Biology.
Everyone's style and character picks would constantly evolve during this process. But generally, one friend would lose far more than he would win, and we would tease him mercilessly, as you do.
One day, out of nowhere, he was unbeatable. Winning game after game, to all of our amazement.
My other friend, who I don't think graduated high school and almost certainly never read anything about sleep science or brain development, made the following comment, which struck me as profound at the time:
"JP was dreaming this shit last light. No doubt, dreaming it all night"
Another example of sub/unconscious learning happens in sports. Another pastime of mine is playing pickup basketball.
One of the best ways to get into a hot shooters head is to simply say "You're shooting really well today. What are you doing differently?" the same applies to things like a golf swing.
The first time it happened I thought I was dead, because I felt completely conscious but could not control my body nor receive input from my senses. I kind of panicked, and with what felt like an extreme effort was able to become fully awake.
Since then it happens from time to time (I can't make it happen) and it's a very pleasant experience since you're in a dreamy state where you can pretty much decide what you dream about.
It's a state that is between awake and asleep; when in that state, it's very easy to fall into actual sleep (to lose consciousness), and very difficult (but possible) to awaken completely.
I keep good memory of the experience each time.
I would like to talk about it with people who experienced the same thing, but could never find anyone just by talking about it to friends around me. Where should I look? Does this thing have a name?
For me it's easier to wake up from it than to fall asleep. Usually to actually fall asleep I have to wake myself up for 5 minutes then drift off again. However, I know that if I open my eyes the effect is gone, so I choose not to which is what makes it "difficult" to wake up. I have successfully opened my eyes and even moved around a decent amount, and then gotten back into that state, one time.
One of my best experiences was using it to fly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047370
http://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming/
Unfortunately I haven't had much success getting into that state, but entering a semi-controlled dream state is definitely fun.
The Wikipedia page about Sleep paralysis make it sound like something horrible where you're attacked by monsters that you can't escape because you don't control your body.
I actually enjoy it when it happens (and would like it to happen more often!) but apart from that it seems that, yes, that's what it is, so thanks.
Lucid dreaming (at least according to Wikipedia) is something different -- a brief lapse of consciousness inside a dream. That happens to me also, quite frequently, but is quite a different experience. When I dream about unpleasant things I often begin to think "meh, this isn't real, it's probably a dream", and the dream takes another direction -- but not one that I control. I wouldn't say I'm fully conscious then; it's more that my dreaming self is aware he's in a dream.
I gotta say though, the first time it happened (I must have been 12 years old), I thought that was it. I thought I'd never move again. I hope the world can educate children and bring more awareness to what sleep paralysis is. It's an extremely stressful and unusual experience and one you would not be able to recognize unless you knew about it beforehand. God knows how many "I've been abducted by aliens" lunatics have actually just experienced that.
So if you have kids, take 10 minutes to tell them about it.
You're right it happens more often when I'm super tired.
About telling my kids, I don't know. Kids have a way of taking everything you say very seriously, and growing it in their head like it's an Important Thing (which is good and bad at the same time). Why bother them with something they may never experience?
It's so much more important to teach them how not ti be run over by a car!!! and something I have to repeat every. single. minute. (They don't generalize; they know they shouldn't cross the street without looking when we're walking to school; but during weekends if they drop something they'll run after it in the middle of the street like it's a totally different situation. But I digress).
> But most importantly, our work revives that age-old fantasy of learning during our sleep
Can someone elaborate on how responding to preconditioned stimuli (a voice repeating the same question over and over) can translate to learning things while we are asleep?
As noted in the article, brain centers associated with attention are deactivated during sleep, so the possibility of acquiring semantic or episodic knowledge seems remote, as does the possibility of acquiring procedural knowledge without the "start it just before falling asleep" condition.
Alternately, we might find that certain people are very good at certain tasks, and it'll be a more like trade guilds.
I always assumed this helped my brain solidify the mechanics of the song.
The experiment's novel condition was to begin a procedural task before sleep then continue the task as subjects fell asleep and slept, monitoring them the whole time.
Cf my other comment in this thread.
I think that even while awake, the decision making happens first unconsciously, then it gets brought into our consciousness.
You think that you are thinking about it, but actually you're just waiting for your subconscious to arrive at the answer and tell it to you.
Edit: If that's true, its freaks me out. Maybe our intelligence is overrated if we make our decisions while unconscious. In other words, if I'm making choices while unconscious, are my knowledge, belief, moral compass, etc involved?
What's the word for the mental processing we do when awake, but are not personally aware of? Is it also 'unconscious'? Isn't there another word we can use?
Subconscious.
If you aren't familiar with Benjamin Libet [1] and his neuropsychology experiments, I think you will find them absolutely fascinating.
From the article: "This work soon crossed into an investigation into human consciousness; his most famous experiment was meant to demonstrate that the unconscious electrical processes in the brain called Bereitschaftspotential (or readiness potential) discovered by Lüder Deecke and Hans Helmut Kornhuber in 1964 precede conscious decisions to perform volitional, spontaneous acts, implying that unconscious neuronal processes precede and potentially cause volitional acts which are retrospectively felt to be consciously motivated by the subject."