A new study has found that having weird dreams may help the brain combine our experiences and learn from them.
The importance of good sleep and one’s dreams has long been recognized for memory and learning, and that particular connection could be from the weird and crazy dreams people have during rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep. This is the stage of sleep when the brain is the most active.
Lead author of the study, Nicolas Deperrois, “What we lack is a theory that ties this together with consolidation of experiences, generalization of concepts and creativity.”
During non-REM, or the other phases of sleep, the brain replays the sensory stimuli that people experience during the times that they’re awake. This coincides with spontaneous bursts of brain anxiety, which produces vivid dreams during REM sleep.
The researchers used a machine learning technique called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create artificial dream states In order to better examine how each phase affects learning, before they stimulated the brain’s cortex activity by introducing strange elements into the artificial dreams.
Simply explained, GANs is basically ‘two neural networks competing with each other to generate new data from the same dataset, in this case a series of simple pictures of objects and animals.’ This system also manufactures new artificial images that look ‘superficially realistic to humans.’
Afterwards, the researchers stimulated the cortex in these distinct states: wakefulness, non-REM sleep, and REM sleep.
During wakefulness, the model is exposed to photos of dogs, cars, boats, and other objects. Then in non-REM sleep, the model replays these pictures with some occlusions. Meanwhile, the REM sleep produces new GANs, which then generates twisted by realistic versions and combinations of these dogs, boats, cars, and more.
According to author Dr. Jakob Jordan at the Department of Physiology, University of Bern, “Non-REM and REM dreams become more realistic as our model learns. While non-REM dreams resemble waking experiences quite closely, REM dreams tend to creatively combine these experiences.”
In order to see if they could actually alter the process, the researchers disrupted the different sleep states. When they suppressed REM sleep in the model, the dreams were less creative in structure. And when it came to removing the non-REM sleep phase, the representations were found to be more sensitive to sensory fluctuations.
As shown by the study, wakefulness, non-REM, and REM sleep seem to have ‘complementary functions for learning: experiencing the stimulus, solidifying that experience and discovering semantic concepts.’
As shared by Deperrois, “We think these findings suggest a simple evolutionary role for dreams, without interpreting their exact meaning. It shouldn’t be surprising that dreams are bizarre: this bizarreness serves a purpose.”
He added, “The next time you’re having crazy dreams, maybe don’t try to find a deeper meaning; your brain may be simply organizing your experiences.”
Notably, REM sleep is the final stage of sleep before people wake up. For those individuals that can remember their dreams, it’s due to the brain reaching that most active period, ‘during which it may be going about this organization.’
A number of people share that their dreams tend to have a variety of components that are quite at odds with one another. They explain that this could be due to the brain trying to solve a problem by ‘experimentally combining disparate elements, such as the boat-dog hybrids made by the GANs.’
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