Weird dreams train us for the unexpected, says new theory
It’s a common enough scenario: you walk into your local supermarket to buy some milk, but by the time you get to the till, the milk bottle has turned into a talking fish. Then you remember you’ve got your GCSE maths exam in the morning, but you haven’t attended a maths lesson for nearly three decades.
The Overfitted Brain Hypotheses
Dreams can be bafflingly bizarre, but that’s the whole point
- By injecting some random weirdness into our humdrum existence, dreams leave us better equipped to cope with the unexpected.
- A common problem when it comes to training AI is that it becomes too familiar with the data it’s trained on
- Scientists fix this by introducing some chaos into the data, in the form of noisy or corrupted inputs
Other theories for why we dream
Freudian theory: Dreams represent “disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes”
- Memory consolidation theory: Perhaps dreams are just replays of past events
- Threat simulation theory: This posits that dreams are an ancient biological defence mechanism that enable us to practice overcoming threats
- Activation synthesis theory: Maybe dreams are a random string of memories thrown together, but they may provoke us to make new connections or trigger creative epiphanies
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