Weird Dreams Might be a Brain Feature, Not a Bug
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 963 Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2021
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn how weird dreams may help us in the real world; how we date dinosaurs; and why a healthy grip means a healthy body.
A theory from AI says our weird dreams help us better perceive the world by Briana Brownell
- Our dreams’ weirdness might be why we have them, argues new AI-inspired theory of dreaming. (2021). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-05/cp-odw050621.php
- Hoel, E. (2021). The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization. Patterns, 2(5), 100244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100244
Paleontologists know how old dinosaurs were when they died because bones are like tree rings by Cameron Duke
- Anonymous. (2019, June 11). Which Dinosaur Bones Are “Real”? Field Museum. https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/which-dinosaur-bones-are-real
- Field Museum. (2020, November 25). Growth Rings From Fossil Bones Reveals T. rex Had Huge Growth Spurts, but Other Dinosaurs Grew “Slow and Steady.” SciTechDaily. https://scitechdaily.com/growth-rings-from-fossil-bones-reveals-t-rex-had-huge-growth-spurts-but-other-dinosaurs-grew-slow-and-steady/
- Welsh, J. (2012, June 27). How Sweet! Dinosaurs May Have Been Warm-Blooded After All. Livescience.com; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/21215-dinosaur-bones-warm-blooded.html
- Wits University. (2021, May 12). Southern African dinosaur had irregular growth. Phys.org; Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-05-southern-african-dinosaur-irregular-growth.html
A Healthy Grip Means a Healthy Body by Ashley Hamer
- Grip Strength Is Good Indicator of Overall Health - UConn Today. (2011, June 6). UConn Today. https://today.uconn.edu/2011/06/grip-strength-is-good-indicator-of-overall-health/#
- Sanderson, W. C., & Scherbov, S. (2014). Measuring the Speed of Aging across Population Subgroups. PLoS ONE, 9(5), e96289. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096289
- Mukherjee, S., Clouston, S., Kotov, R., Bromet, E., & Luft, B. (2019). Handgrip Strength of World Trade Center (WTC) Responders: The Role of Re-Experiencing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Symptoms. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(7), 1128. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16071128
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from |
| 0:04.9 | Curiosity.com. I'm Cody Gough. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about a |
| 0:09.2 | theory from AI about why we have weird dreams. how paleontologists know how old dinosaurs are, and why a healthy |
| 0:17.0 | grip means a healthy body. |
| 0:19.0 | Let's satisfy some curiosity. |
| 0:22.0 | Artificial Intelligence takes inspiration from the Curiosity. But AI can also teach us about our own brains. |
| 0:34.0 | That's why an AI researcher just published a theory for why we have such weird dreams. |
| 0:40.0 | They might be the brain's way of helping us perceive the world more accurately. |
| 0:45.0 | It all has to do with how AI learns. |
| 0:49.0 | Let's say we wanted to teach an artificial neural network |
| 0:52.0 | to look at images and tell us what they are. To do this, first the |
| 0:56.1 | artificial neural network needs to learn from examples of images labeled with what |
| 1:00.5 | they are, usually millions of them. |
| 1:03.0 | Training and artificial neural network on labeled images might allow them to differentiate between a dog and a cat, for example, |
| 1:10.0 | or to detect even more subtle differences like distinguishing between a cat and a |
| 1:15.5 | cougar. But the problem is sometimes the data that an AI is trained on has quirks that let the |
| 1:22.1 | AI learn the wrong thing. For example, if most of the |
| 1:26.2 | images of a cougar are taken outdoors, it may learn that being on green grass is a particular |
| 1:31.8 | characteristic of a cougar. |
| 1:34.0 | Then fail to recognize one if, for instance, it ends up on your back deck. |
| 1:39.0 | Yikes! |
| 1:41.0 | This error in generalizing data is called overfitting. |
... |
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