RE: How's Everyone Feeling Right Meow?
October 16, 2016 at 6:49 am
(This post was last modified: October 16, 2016 at 7:04 am by emjay.)
(October 16, 2016 at 12:40 am)vorlon13 Wrote:(October 15, 2016 at 11:43 pm)Emjay Wrote: I don't put any stock in dreams whatsoever. I've had some pretty weird/fucked up/disturbing ones but I don't ascribe to them any meaning above and beyond the brain just consolidating learning in your sleep by flooding the system as it were with activation. Because neural learning happens whenever a neuron fires so learning and retrieval happen in the same step. So that's how I see it, with it consolidating learning for things you've been recently thinking about... the new additions as it were to your mental landscape. So if I watch three different horror films and then see aspects from them all, however weirdly connected/related in my dreams, I'm not at all surprised.
What about the one where big spiders paralyze you and then eat your eyeballs right out of your head ??
No idea... I take it you didn't watch a horror film to that effect? I don't know... it is just a working theory... general enough to feel confident that something like that is happening... for the sake of how I approach dreams mentally in real life... but not confident enough to be sure of the details and why certain things activate more than others or what their in-dream connections represent... whether there actually is an associative connection between things that seem related in a dream or whether it's just the flow of the dream that makes it feel like that. Or whether strange connections are just an intermediate stage of the 'settling' process where neurons are in the process of learning what to represent, not just how strong to represent. Because neural networks are self-organising so a neuron will take up the job of representing a new pattern it finds in its inputs, through a basically statistical, iterative process. And that's why I think that sleep/dreaming could well be a necessary thing to provide space for that process to occur. In my thinking it would happen in daily life as well - in the sense that neurons are always learning - but that at night it can consolidate and strengthen what already exists without sensory interruption from the outside world.