/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10546616]

what and why are dreams?
if brain uses sleep to regenerate and relax why is it wasting energy on creating so complex shit?

[Anonymous No.10546645]

>dreams are created in the brain
Right, just like urine is stored in the balls

[Anonymous No.10546696]

>>10546616
We don't really have any explanation. My favorite theory is that while we sleep there are brief moments in which the consciousness receives or captures part of the activity done by the subconscious to elaborate memories and transfer them to long term storage. Since they are vaguely similar to the normal sensory and mnemonic information it is used to process, it attempts to interpret them through the normal processes of our perception, thus creating the dream.

The problem with this theory (aside from having no empirical evidence) is that it sees dreams as "mistakes" in the sense that they serve no purpose, which is entirely possible, but does not fit well in an evolutionary point of view, as you say in fact, they kind of are a waste of energy if that's the case.

[Anonymous No.10547187]

>>10546616
the brain probably just can't prevent it from happening.

[Anonymous No.10547212]

>>10546616
Brain never stops working, so I guess part of the regenerative cycle just happens to stimulate certain areas that access fragmented memories and ideas.

[Anonymous No.10547225]

>>10546696
>The problem with this theory (aside from having no empirical evidence) is that it sees dreams as "mistakes" in the sense that they serve no purpose, which is entirely possible, but does not fit well in an evolutionary point of view, as you say in fact, they kind of are a waste of energy if that's the case.
there's no evolutionary downside, so there's nothing to force it out from our functionality. there's not the slightest indication that dreaming wastes energy, because there's no indication being aware of one's thoughts needs energy.
the theory of 'transferring memories to long-term storage' sounds like a badly written sci-fi from the '70s. who ever saw this transfer happening? how do we know it even makes sense, that the brain has such functions and transferring between them is a thing? and then it also needs to be explained why newborn kittens dream almost constantly for the first days of their life; what sort of short term memory gets transferred to long-term storage? someone got carried away by computer analogies on this one.

[Anonymous No.10547473]

>>10547225
No, there is a process that makes a memory enter the long term memory storage. It may be a near instant one (like with flash memories), but generally takes weeks. And while my words may not have been the best, it is not so much as physically moving data from one place to another, but rather a process of encoding the memory so that it can be recovered later (building associations and connections between concepts, images and sounds, emotions, etc. everything that makes memory memory).

I'm not romanticizing anything, by the way. It's a pretty straightforward and well accepted in psychology that our memory is made up of three "stages" or "types": sensorial memory (of extremely brief life but incredibly vast), working memory (which is the stuff that reaches the consciousness, quite literally the stuff that we are thinking or consciously feeling at any given moment), long-term memory. It's not universally true, but in general any kind of information needs to go through all three before becoming what we commonly call a "memory", and to jump from one another it is filtered, transformed and encoded.

>who ever saw this transfer happening?
Neural imaging. For the long term part at least, the hyppocampus is the protagonist in that phase and lights up like a lamp in REM sleep.

>then it also needs to be explained why newborn kittens dream almost constantly for the first days of their life; what sort of short term memory gets transferred to long-term storage?
Being in REM sleep does not mean you are constantly dreaming, it simly is the phase in which dreaming is (by far) most frequent and vivid. That I imagine is what they were measuring in kittens (in newborn humans is the same), since I doubt they handed them questionnaires to know frequency of dreams.

>someone got carried away by computer analogies on this one.
That is a fair accusation of all the cognitive school of psychology. One which I actually share, but not on this specific topic.

[Anonymous No.10547542]

>>10547473
>in psychology

[Anonymous No.10547557]

>>10547225
>there's no indication being aware of one's thoughts needs energy
do you even know how synapses work?

[Anonymous No.10547566]

>>10547542
>make a question pertaining to the field of psychology
>lol what is this pseudobullcrap?