In the future, science may develop ways to control cognitive functions enhanced by sleep, "using sleep and dreams as a tool the way we use learning and teaching while we are conscious," he said.
In one study, he and colleagues successfully manipulated the content of rats' dreams with a tone they had used earlier to direct the animals as they navigated a maze. The tone caused the rats to dream of the section of the maze they had been taught to associate with that tone.
Going without
No one can speak to the value of sleep more than someone deprived of it. Alan Berliner, a filmmaker who explored his own insomnia in his 2006 documentary "Wide Awake." offered that perspective to the discussion. [5 Fun Facts About Sleep]
"Every night when I put my head on the pillow, it's like an adventure," Berliner says in a clip of the film played during the discussion. He described songs, particularly Leonard Cohen's "In My Secret Life," looping in his head and his thoughts racing uncontrollably.
"I started to think the expression human error means sleepiness," he said in the film.
The discussion, presented in collaboration with the Imagine Science Film Festival, was moderated by Tim McHenry of the Rubin Museum of Art.
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5 Comments
Add CommentSo according to paragraph three, Schizophrenic patients answered the test more accurately than their healthy neighbors because they did not incorporate false assumptions of tone thus responding to the test later.... so define healthy again.....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's a potential functional explanation for much of what we experience during dreaming. We know that we have both short term and long term memories.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn computer systems, this separation allows the very efficient, high speed storage of information acquired during periods of 'normal' operations (i.e., commonly, during the day). In order to minimize the impact of data acquisition to competing processes and potential data loss, new information is simply stored in a 'temporary' high speed buffer as a sequential list, analogous to short term memory.
In order to clear this limited high speed memory for reuse and complete the processing of the newly acquired information, further analyzing it to minimize long term storage requirements and maximize its retrieval flexibility and information value, it is retrieved during 'off-hours' or 'downtime', analogous to sleep, when competing processes are either not very active or, more conveniently, can be quiesced or shut down.
This better utilizes available processing capacity and allows processes that could interfere with normal operations, such as making structural modifications to critical memory elements.
During this 'database maintenance' processing, newly acquired information elements are retrieved and their content in analyzed in the context of preexisting information. This usually requires the retrieval of segments or 'snippets' of long term memories so that the new information can be linked or in other ways related to existing information, potentially optimizing later retrieval performance for perhaps many varying uses, likely eliminating potentially redundant information (the image of your dog, for example) or replacing with external references or links. In this way every dog experience in long term memory does not contain a large, high resolution image of a dog. Maintaining separate indexes - linked lists, can allow fast retrieval of all dog memories, for example.
So, in this way the offline background tasks related to the optimization long term memory database storage space usage, access speed and information content can require the retrieval (and perhaps reexperience) of past memories. Short term memories of information deemed to be unnecessary can be discarded. When all the high speed, short term 'bulk' memory has been processed, its high speed storage can be cleared for reuse the following day.
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe past and newly acquired information retrieved and analyzed during the database maintenance process might produce some residual reexperiences, or dream recollections. Perhaps, if we routinely experience 'bad' dreams of falling, spiders, being lost, etc., it is because the identification of those experiences has been prioritized for some reason, resulting in all new information being evaluated in those contexts.
Of course, there may be other factors contributing to our dream state recollections, but having the ability to acquire new information during 'normal operations' while minimizing the impact to processes critical to those operations essentially dictates the necessity for some off-hour or offline memory maintenance processes, to free up short term memory capacity consumed during the day.
BTW, a well known if extreme example of such information systems is the CERN Large Hadron Collider data acquistion systems. Experiment detector facilities capture the detections of residual particles produces by high energy particle accelerated. The very large amount of data collected during each collision is 'dumped' to disk subsystems and later processed offline to search for interesting conditions represented by the combinations of various particles detected. That information is further analyzed by scientists - the potential Higgs boson 'discovery' was inferred from the presence of a couple of intriguing photons...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs always, I'm disappointed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould it be so difficult to use dreams in their best form, ie: what we see in dreams are symbols which tell a story of what lies ahead.
Going Up via ladder, elevator or climbing stairs denotes future success.
Going Down, the lack thereof.
Houses and cars represent us, so if we run out of gas in a dream, we run out of energy in "real life."
The Moon - something hidden revealed/The Sun - Happiness.
But what of great inventors who took naps and awoke having the answer in mind derived from a dream?
The problem it seems is modern day science doesn't seem to address what some knew in ancient Egypt and it does beg one to wont to sing, "When will they ever learn, long time passing?"