[HN Gopher] Sleep on it: How the brain processes many experience...
___________________________________________________________________
Sleep on it: How the brain processes many experiences, even when
'offline'
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 190 points
Date : 2024-09-02 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.yale.edu)
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Are we unconscious when we sleep or do we merely lose the
| capacity to remember? How could we tell the difference?
| guerrilla wrote:
| Are we sure there is a difference?
| namero999 wrote:
| Of course there is a difference. You are probably conscious
| right now of more things that you don't even register, like
| the movement of your chest while breathing, sounds outside of
| your window, etc. It's indeed the difference between
| consciousness and metaconsciousness, the latter being the
| ability to re-represent an experience to your cognition
| (which remembering is an instance of).
|
| A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your dreams or
| not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether you were
| conscious just a moment before waking up.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > You are probably conscious right now of more things that
| you don't even register
|
| I would say this is a contradiction.
|
| > A very doable experiment. Whether you remember your
| dreams or not, next time you wake up, ask yourself whether
| you were conscious just a moment before waking up.
|
| This is begging the question. It seems possible that we
| were conscious of our dreams if we remember them and were
| not conscious of them if we don't.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Research has shown that we form memories related to things that
| happen around us in our sleep and are conscious in some ways.
| We don't form episodic memories of sleep time and it's likely
| that what it's like to be conscious while asleep is quite
| different from our waking experience even aside from dreams.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Are we unconscious when we sleep
|
| I don't think that is the right question to ask. Sleeping
| person is unconscious almost by definition. They don't respond
| to stimuli and they don't do much of anything besides breathing
| and just laying there.
|
| > do we merely lose the capacity to remember?
|
| That is a better question. Some people remembers their dreams.
| Sometimes people can remember stimuli which happened while they
| were asleep. (For example it happened multiple times to me that
| noises happening around me where incorporated into my dreams in
| various forms.) So if sleeping were just amnesia then these
| dream memories would need to be explained somehow.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| I disagree that sleep is necessarily unconscious. It's like a
| coma -- but is the internal world still running? For
| instance, maybe we are conscious in different phases of sleep
| but not others.
| harry_ord wrote:
| I think there's a medical difference between unconscious and
| sleeping. At least I don't think being forced unconscious by
| something (a bonk on the head) is like sleeping
| patafemma wrote:
| I guess it depends on how you define consciousness. I think by
| most definitions, we definitely are unconscious when we are
| asleep.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Dreaming is clearly both sleep and conscious
| swayvil wrote:
| Ever entered a room and immediately forgot why you came in?
| Dream might be much the same.
|
| Memory could be attached to context. Change the context
| extremely and you lose the associated memories.
|
| And dream is an extreme change of context.
| swayvil wrote:
| After much thought I have decided that thought is central to this
| whole thing. Anybody who disagrees is dreaming.
|
| EDIT Satire is lost on you people.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Sleeping to solidify memories and concepts is like when you were
| a kid and you just slept off the entire 8 hours car journey. Not
| only you get the sleep, not only you get the result, but you also
| didn't even notice it happen
| keiferski wrote:
| Something I've been wondering about - but have been unable to
| find any solid research on - is if it would be "optimal" to sleep
| immediately after any learning/training session, whether it be
| mental or physical, instead of just resting while still awake.
|
| If sleep is the best state for the body to be in to consolidate
| memories, reduce fatigue, etc., then it would seem logical to try
| and be in the sleep state as much as possible.
|
| Obviously the difficult part is actually being able to fall
| asleep on command without using some kind of pharmaceutical, but
| I do think falling asleep quickly is something that can be
| learned:
|
| https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/want-to-fall-asleep-faste...
| nope1000 wrote:
| Funnily enough I wonder if a burst of adrenaline after learning
| is effective. Kind of tricking your brain into thinking it just
| survived a dangerous situation and must retain whatever lead up
| to it.
| keiferski wrote:
| I was watching one of those performance science podcasts
| (Hubermann, I think) and I do believe he said that if you
| take a cold shower immediately after learning, it increases
| the likelihood that you'll remember it. So I wonder if the
| optimal learning pattern would be _learn > cold shower >
| sleep_.
|
| Don't quote me though, as it's been awhile.
| whycome wrote:
| Using our evolutionary predispositions for good rather than
| evil??
|
| I always wondered in a half serious way if sex (just innuendo
| or tittilating images or something) could have positive
| effects on learning if done right for the same reasons:
| evolutionarily wanting to retain information if it has a
| better chance of leading to mating. Of course you'd only test
| this with adult students.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Would love to see some research on it, but this reminds me of
| the structure of a traditional yoga asana practice and I've
| wondered the same thing about rest after a learning/training
| session. Typically at the end of a practice session of yoga
| asana (and sometimes in between postures) you'll take savasana
| and just rest in open awareness. A teacher of mine would always
| say this is the most important part of class, to let everything
| integrate in.
|
| When I started training Muay Thai I found that I often would
| "lose" a lot of what we had worked on in class, and then
| started taking savasana right when I got home. In that not-
| quite-sleep state my brain would replay what we worked on.
|
| Sometimes if I'm really bashing into a wall with some coding
| problem I'll just take savasana for 10-15 minutes and get back
| to it. I feel like it helps.
| whycome wrote:
| The whole setup of the modern school day is dumb. It's too
| early for many growing minds. And it doesn't balance what's
| taught with a chance to reflect on it. And the school year
| should be the whole year with more breaks rather than a summer
| time off.
|
| It would be pretty cool to have some sort of siesta for
| students in the day. Maybe one of those private schools would
| do it.
| timshell wrote:
| This was somewhat the thesis of my dissertation.
|
| I suggested cognitive fatigue was an adaptive construct that
| biases people to go offline and replay their memories, and that
| this was decision-theory optimal from a learning / reward
| perspective.
|
| https://mayank-agrawal.com/papers/AgrawalMattarCohenDaw21.pd...
| Towaway69 wrote:
| When I feel fatigue coming on, I just lie on a sofa with some
| soundscape playing on my noise cancellation headphones.
|
| I close my eyes and allow my mind to drift. Similar to the
| phase before falling asleep. Most of the time, this mind
| drifting is enough but sometimes I fall asleep - both states
| help.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Since this is processing of past events and future possibles
| during sleep, would it be fair to hypothesize that animals that
| sleep actively (appear to dream) are conscious when awake?
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Some go as far as believing that plants have consciousness.
| Which isn't surprising considering slime moulds:
|
| > Slime molds have a variety of behaviors otherwise seen in
| animals with brains.[0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slime_mold
| uv-depression wrote:
| Starting with my undergrad but fully committing to it by grad
| school, I (and several of my friends who went through similar
| programs in math/cs) have a strategy that uses this. If, for
| example, I had a new problem set in a math course, I would bash
| my head against it in the evening for an hour or two. I'd make an
| honest attempt but move on from problems quickly if I got stuck.
| I'd rarely get much done. Then, I'd do my best to get a good
| night's sleep (at least 7.5 hours quality sleep). In the morning
| I'd try the problems again first thing after coffee, and
| frequently found that I could do a significant portion of the
| problems, or at least make headway. This might be biased by the
| fact that I'm really much more of a morning person to begin with,
| but I know several people who use this strategy.
| sidnb13 wrote:
| Cool to see that this worked well for someone. Super hard to
| force the key insight in a problem to magically appear given
| more time sunk into it. Big weakness of mine honestly, and
| requires a lot of self-awareness to pull myself out of a
| problem-solving rut. I like the idea of hacking sleep - do you
| find yourself priming your mind with the problem before nodding
| off? Curious how a bedtime wind-down routine factors into how
| effective this is.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Over years of math undergrad and grad school I tried very
| hard and was never able to get this to work, so you're not
| alone. I was able to reliably reproduce hopeful feelings
| after sleep, but upon investigation the "new leads" were
| either things I had already tried (and forgotten why they
| didn't work) or they were the type of imprecise high-level
| vague direction ideas that were never difficult to generate
| and still had 99% of the true effort remaining to grind
| through the details.
| euroderf wrote:
| While programming Java full-time, I found myself waking in the
| middle of the night with some big chunk of my brain grinding
| away on coding issues. Not good.
| huijzer wrote:
| I agree. It can definitely be useful, but not if I'm
| stressing too much about it. Then, waking up feels like I was
| hit by a bus in the night.
| orobinson wrote:
| Reminds me of a similar situation I experienced while working
| on a big project. I came down with the flu and woke up in a
| delirious, feverish state at 2am feeling like I was trapped
| in the codebase and I needed to make all the tests pass so I
| could escape. It almost felt like my conscious brain had
| somehow found its way into the unconscious part.
| yarg wrote:
| I've had a couple of these.
|
| The first one was programming; I'd been working on a little
| image editing application, implementing anti-aliased
| gradient brushes (one colour in the centre and another at
| the edges, with a fast enough and close enough hack to deal
| with the jagged edges).
|
| The fever had me hallucinating circles and how to render
| them for the entire (unbelievably tedious) night.
|
| The other time I'd been playing RA95 for a few hours (I was
| addicted to that shit) and started feeling progressively
| worse over the space of a few minutes.
|
| I called it an early night (it was about eight o'clock) and
| went to bed - then it got worse;
|
| The fever, the headache, and an army of little men and
| tanks running all over the ceiling.
| e-brake wrote:
| Coding nightmares! I get these too, when working too much.
| Perseverating on solving intractable problems that don't
| exist. Once solved it though, and woke up thrilled. That was
| a good work-night.
| tzs wrote:
| I do the same with the NYT crossword puzzles. The puzzle for a
| day is released at 10 pm NY time (except the Sunday and Monday
| puzzles are released 4 hours earlier) the day before, which is
| 7 pm in my time zone.
|
| I start the puzzle at the end of my day. If I get stuck and
| cannot finish it before I fall asleep, probably 95% of the time
| when I take a look again sometime the next day I immediately
| see answers to several of the things I was stuck on and
| finishing the puzzle goes smoothly.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Was that because your mind was working on it in the
| background, or because a reset in state allowed the next
| attempt to find new paths?
|
| I wonder if it would be possible to make a study to someone
| distinguish between those, like where the control group gets
| REM sleep and the experimental group gets some kind of
| anesthesia. Is there a difference on how well each group does
| "returning" to a puzzle, compared to working on a fresh one?
| dimal wrote:
| This pretty much describes my method of working as well. Often
| at the end of the day, when I'm not feeling like I have enough
| energy to solve anything new, I'll spend some time just looking
| over some new problems I'll have to solve in the next few days.
| I don't try to solve them. I'm just "loading them into my
| head". The next morning I usually find some potential solutions
| waiting for me. Thanks, brain! I'll repeat that process a few
| times until I have them solved. Unfortunately, while this works
| great in real life, it doesn't work for interviews.
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't think it needs to be as "structural" as you're
| describing here. Simply "work on something else if you're
| stuck, come back to it after a day, two days, or longer" has
| long been one of my secrets to get stuff done.
|
| I once worked somewhere that allowed you to work only on one
| ticket/task, before you were allowed to move on to another.
| Completely dumb policy for so many reasons.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I think it was Thomas Edison who said, "Never go to sleep
| without a request to your subconscious."
|
| Excellent advice.
| yarg wrote:
| I don't even need the coffee - I wake up having solved the
| problem.
|
| Generally around 2 or 3 in the morning, just when I need it the
| most.
| choilive wrote:
| I think just about everyone has a similar anecdote.
|
| I was stuck on particularly tricky part of a musical piece I
| was learning - hours and hours of practice and I just couldn't
| get it down. Went to bed, woke up and was able to nail it
| within the hour.
|
| Sleep is underrated.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| Interesting, as I would divide my dreams up 25/25/25/25 between
| mundane daily experiences, the same or very similar dream,
| totally new situations and finally the surreal ones where you
| magically end up in random places and random situations.
|
| Always figured it's a blend of taking past and recent experiences
| and re-ordering them, with a hint of hypothetical scenarios for
| the future.
|
| The "flicker" sounds like a good A/B test for the hypothetical
| while the replays are good for memorisation.
|
| I can often tell when I'm dreaming when it comes to the more
| hypothetical ones due to dodgy physics or whatever (try nipping
| my face and can't feel anything) so I'm probably buggering that
| process up a bit. Maybe an INTJ trait. I remember doing that as a
| kid and being able to fly, but nowadays often I can't get beyond
| 10 metres above ground. Been rate limited.
| RHSman2 wrote:
| Car drive: Bash head against wall all day. Give up. Drive home in
| zoned out state and realize solution (or at least the unseen
| issue).
| fredgrott wrote:
| A way to improve it is to use ZettelKasten note taking to detail
| the problems in tackling the problem so that when you wake up you
| can review those notes before re-examining your approach to the
| problem...
|
| I started using this approach about 20 days ago...came up with
| new software architecture beyond cleanarch due to this new using
| of those techniques.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| I've been lucky enjoy to have been able to live around my
| unconscious. I made a conscious decision to allow my unconscious
| to guide me through life.
|
| The original idea to do this came from Le Corbusier[1] who once
| described his process of working as being a phase of collecting
| details on a project, a phase of doing something else (allowing
| his unconscious to work on the project) and finally he would sit
| down and complete the project.
|
| The disadvantage is that I never know when inspiration hits and
| when exactly I will get something done. It's important to be
| organised and have everything written down is my approach.
|
| Also I give myself time and room to explore possible solutions
| from seemingly unrelated areas - a kind of zen navigation[2] for
| project work.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
|
| [2] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/667285-he-had-a-
| tremendous-...
| financetechbro wrote:
| Do you have more details on your strategy?
| Towaway69 wrote:
| I organise my thoughts using a mind map - keeping my mind
| free of "oh I have to remember that"-situations. But keep
| everything written down, hoarding ideas to have ready when
| needed.
|
| Trust in the future and allow random events or interactions
| to play a meaningful part - ie be open to doing unexpected
| things.
|
| Have time to reflect. I don't wake with an alarm clock, I
| wake with my thoughts and dreams.
| smusamashah wrote:
| Your process sounds like something a writer might say. Are you
| a writer?
|
| I am saying based on how writers/poets etc are depicted.
| Waiting for ideas to arrive, sometimes they keep they keep
| waiting for it, sometimes it hits them on a random event.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| I do a bit of writing but also many other things including
| coding and art.
|
| This isn't something I would be doing/recommend if I were to
| be working in job where creativity isn't a big part of the
| job.
| yamrzou wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes
| Use Dreams for Creative Problem-Solving_ -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Committee_of_Sleep
| bloopernova wrote:
| Admiral Raymond Spruance of the World War 2 US Navy was known as
| very calm in a crisis; he was very serious about getting enough
| sleep so that he was well-rested during any battles. When other
| officers would stay awake for 36 to 48 hours at a stretch, he
| would read a novel and get sleep because he knew he had enormous
| responsibilities that needed him at his best.
|
| He also walked 8+ miles a day, even when at sea he would make
| sure he walked around the ship, usually with some other officers
| to discuss any pertinent issues of the day. Walking is great for
| turning over problems in your mind, or even just daydreaming to
| give your subconscious mind "space to work".
| encomiast wrote:
| I am also a habitual walker, though I don't typically get eight
| miles in. I often listen to books and podcasts while walking
| and at times wonder if I'm doing myself a disservice by not
| just letting my mind wander. One the one hand, it is about the
| only time I allow myself a solid hour to listen to something,
| but on the other maybe it's time better spent giving 'space to
| work' as you say.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Try listening to "white noise" or sound-scapes - something
| that provides an endless blanket of sound without providing
| input that the brain has to actively process.
| visarga wrote:
| It's what LLMs are missing. They don't sleep. If only they could
| sleep, they would be able to make novel experiences stick past
| the context buffer. Sleep is like fine-tuning on previous
| interactions.
| Hadriel wrote:
| Ok can someone explain how they reached this conclusion that the
| brain is able to separate, merge, or drop experiences during
| sleep within 1 second? The rat experiment mentioned doesnt
| explain how they are able to interpret brain signals and map them
| to prior experiences.
| timshell wrote:
| Hippocampal replay was the main subject of my dissertation. It
| has been studied primarily in rodents, but there have been a lot
| more human studies in the meantime.
|
| My PhD proposal was to suggest that cognitive fatigue is an
| adaptive construct. Rather than reflect a depletion of glucose
| and that people can't function anymore, cognitive fatigue is a
| suggestion for the agent to go 'offline' and replay.
|
| Two of my collaborators wrote an extremely influential paper
| writing down a Q-learning equation for replay:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0232-z
| samstave wrote:
| This is amazing to hear.
|
| Have you studied the hippocampus memory of hummingbirds much?
|
| Their glucose is consumed to preserve their extraordinary 3d
| spatial memory for all their food sources.
|
| ---
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22357941/
|
| "... _analyses reveal that the HF in hummingbirds is
| significantly larger, relative to telencephalic volume, than
| any bird examined to date_... "
|
| -- IMO the ability of the Hippocampal spatial 'compuiting' - is
| what consumes the glucose in what is their 'GeoPU' - and so to
| be able to think in a 3D _volumetric_ space - not vector space
| - allows for such precise control where the positional
| coordinates of a food source have a heavy weaight in 3D and
| Temporal Memory - which is the same as how it can navigate in a
| 3D point space with its hovering...
|
| It Computes to Live and it Lives to Compute.
|
| GPU folks should be studying hummingbirds.
|
| Especially for AI patchfinding with sensor awareness - as some
| hummingbirds migrate ~2,000 miles from Chile to Canada.
|
| https://www.hummingbirdsplus.org/nature-blog-network/ruby-th...
|
| Now note how frequently this critter needs aerial refuling, and
| it needs to know the best and most efficient path to hop all
| the food-check-points over 2,000 miles
|
| https://i.imgur.com/3MvzmX9.png
|
| _Hummingbirds can fuel expensive hovering flight completely
| with either exogenous glucose or fructose_
|
| https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111...
|
| > _By foraging frequently and fuelling hovering flight directly
| with ingested monosaccharides hummingbirds avoid the energetic
| tax associated with the cost of synthesis of fats from these
| sugars prior to their oxidation. Remarkably, hovering
| hummingbirds are able to utilize fructose and glucose equally,
| a physiological feat which no mammals are thought to match, and
| one that suggests novel physiological capacities for the
| oxidation of fructose by active muscle tissues in hummingbirds.
| The data presented here indicate hummingbirds enhance net
| energy intake though specialization of diet, behaviour, and,
| uniquely, metabolic physiology._
|
| -- now imagine the ripples that are running through the
| hippocampus thats maintaining this level of efficient precision
| of a Body that has near instant acceleration and precisice
| altitude control in a 3d volume.
|
| Hummingbirds are the most amazing critters.
|
| We should be studying humming birds glucose control through the
| HF, not rats.
| timshell wrote:
| Whoa very cool, had no idea about that. I've always been
| intrigued to see whether there could a reconciliation between
| the normative replay theory and the glucose depletion theory.
| A paper that made me think there could be a route:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34381214/
| bmitc wrote:
| What do you mean by agent? Human, brain, some component of the
| brain, etc.?
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Seems like "human", "rat", etc. in this context.
| maxbond wrote:
| _You should rest and meditate on what you have learned._
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I've often though about sleep in RPG terms. Sleeping gives me 1
| experience point to put into any skill, and I get to choose which
| skill gets the experience point by what I work on during the day.
|
| I haven't always succeeded, but I try to at least work-on or
| study something I care about before bed.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| I love this! When dealing with a difficult problem, I like to
| think about it in my head as falling asleep. I find I don't
| necessarily have the solution upon waking, but I will
| understand the space better, and be less fixated on whatever my
| initial thought was.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Over the years, I've learned to recognize when I'm stuck on a
| problem in a way that will be resolved by sleeping on it.
|
| I can go to sleep confident that in the morning I'll probably
| figure out what I just can't get a handle on right now.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I do something similar. I ask "does this feel like there is a
| solution space, is this probably solvable?" If there is I
| pursue it or ruminate on it (mainly incubate it). If not, I ask
| why not or reframe it or move it to "wish list" (my step below
| "roadmap").
|
| Creativity benefits from incubation, setting it aside to see
| what reframings and new ideas pop up.
| efilife wrote:
| and about remembering stuff. When I want to remember something,
| I read it some time before sleeping. After reading I remember
| nothing, but after waking up it magically appears in my memory.
| Very useful
| Layvier wrote:
| Rick Hickey made a great talk about that:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
| meaydinli wrote:
| Alternative access without paywall:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6203620/
| dgfitz wrote:
| In undergrad, I would tackle problem sets or a programming course
| problem as soon as I could. I would wrestle and fight, sometimes
| I made progress, usually not.
|
| Night of sleep and going to $dayjob to pay for school, ideas
| would just manifest themselves in my head. Happened dozens and
| dozens of times.
| j7ake wrote:
| The ideal work schedule for me is work first thing in the morning
| for 2 to 3 hours.
|
| Eat lunch with people, ideally people who are technical enough to
| discuss work. Extend lunch to an espresso afterwards.
|
| Quick nap in the afternoon, any errands/chores, answer any
| emails, schedule meetings in this afternoon slot.
|
| Cook dinner, eat with family.
|
| Work another 2-3 hours before sleeping.
| Loughla wrote:
| You just described my ideal situation.
|
| Covid shut down was the only time I've been fully remote, and I
| was MASSIVELY productive. Because I could manage my own
| schedule around how my brain works.
| j7ake wrote:
| Key is to link the evening session with the morning session
| to maximise impact while preventing burnout.
| o999 wrote:
| This level of complexity and sophistication somehow "randomly
| happened", they said
| sixo wrote:
| well, "was selected-for over trillions of iterations", they
| said, "... by algorithms which were themselves selected-for"
|
| "randomly" makes it sounds like some kind of miracle!
| aoeusnth1 wrote:
| I'm guessing you are saying it is hard to believe that
| evolution creates incrementally greater complexity over
| billions of years?
|
| Reminder that our best estimates of spacetime curvature Omega
| puts it very close to 1.0: the universe is very close to flat,
| so if the universe is indeed not spatially infinite (possible)
| it is at least 100s of times larger in radius than the
| observable universe, which contains about 10^21 stars. [1]
|
| If the universe is spatially infinite, then all possible
| quantum states exist in infinite copies. So yeah, "it happened
| randomly" is not absurd. In fact, I find it a bit strange that
| any educated person would think otherwise.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_universe
| robofanatic wrote:
| If it was designed by a creator then who or what created that
| creator? Something has to begin out of nothing!
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(page generated 2024-09-02 23:00 UTC)