Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!tank!staff_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu
From: staff_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: the surrealism of dreams
Message-ID: <2560@tank.uchicago.edu>
Date: 31 Mar 89 18:41:15 GMT
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Organization: University of Chicago Graduate School of Business
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> 
>And now I'd like to add in a third viewpoint.  It is known among sleep
>researchers that the seemingly nonsensical quality of dreams arises because the
>medulla is sending out random signals during this phase of sleep, which the
>neocortex tries is damned best to weave into a logically consistent framework.

This points up a major flaw that we see again and again in modern biology,
to wit: there is no way one can prove that something occurs 'at random'.
In particular, there is no way in this case to tell whether 'the medulla
is sending out random signals' or whether it is actually sending out signals
in some very definite, well determined fashion which we are unable to fathom.
Western biology (as opposed to Russian, which I'm told takes a somewhat 
different view) seems somewhat preoccupied with this notion of randomness:
Most biologists I have met seem to feel that the theory of evolution is
premised upon random recombination and random mutation. This dogmatic attachment
to an unprovable hypothesis is even more interesting in light of the fact
that the assumption of randomness adds very little to our understanding of
the phenomena in question. 

To add my two cents to this discussion of dreaming, I seem to recall an
old "Scientific American" article on the effects of LSD. Among other things,
it claimed that LSD affected the synapses of some 50,000 "controller
neurons" (if anyone knows the proper name, please post) causing them to
relax in the same fashion that they do naturally when people sleep. Taking
this description of what happens naturally as a given, doesn't it
seem possible that during sleep, the brain relaxes so that it can reorganize
itself, make new sets of associations and possibly reform decision structures?

From personal experience, I know that it is often helpful to get a good night's
sleep if I have encountered a particularly difficult mathematical or
programming problem. Sometimes it almost seems that I wake up with the correct
solution. A plausible model for this is the theory that my mind initially
proceeds down some search path/decision tree on which a solution is not to
be found. Unfortunately, we discover the non-existence of a solution too far
down this tree to be able to easily back up to the decision node at which
we took the wrong branch. We then search around a sub-tree which does not
contain the requisite particulars for our solution. In sleep, the brain
relaxes and we effectively move up the search tree, so that when we reexamine
the problem in the morning the incorrect assumption from the previous night
becomes obvious, or even perhaps it is somehow identified during the dreaming
process. (I realize that this hierarchical decision tree is a bad model for
the real life workings of brain but it helps to describe the process in a 
relatively easy to understand, linear fashion. I think that a model based upon 
competing processes and associative lookup would be more appropriate, but more 
difficult to describe and understand, without adding much to the discussion.)

To take this one step further, I have often performed the following experiment
(albeit non-scientifically because, unfortunately, the means escape me at this
time): Find someone who's been a National Football League fan, and ask him
(randomly, of course) one the the following two questions:

1) Who was that really tall, 6'10" wide receiver, who used to play for the 
Eagles and set the record for consecutive games with at least one reception?

2) Who was that really tall, 6'10" wide receiver, who used to play for the 
Eagles and set the record for consecutive games with at least one reception? 
Its not Randall Cunningham...

(The answer to both of these is Harold Carmichael)

My experience shows that people find 1 much easier to answer than 2, although
2 actually contains all the information in 1, plus one additional fact, and
I suggest that this is because the addition of the name "Randall Cunningham"
actually serves to block the search for "Harold Carmicheal". Randall
Cunningham is also a football player, he also plays for the Eagles and
the structure of the two names is similar. To test this, we could also
ask the following, third question

3) Who was that really tall, 6'10" wide receiver, who used to play for the 
Eagles and set the record for consecutive games with at least one reception? 
Its not Skip Aaron...

where Skip Aaron is no one in particular (apologies if you actually exist),
and the name doesn't seem to have much resemblance to Harold Carmicheal.
My expectation is that 1 will be slightly easier to answer than 3, and
both will be easier than 2. This is because 2 pushes us down the search
tree to a particular node that is close to the solution, without providing
us the information to tell us how we accidentally got to this node instead
of the correct one. In spite of the fact that we're 'close', we're unable
to back up to an appropriate point to discover where we went wrong. Only
when the brain relaxes sufficiently to do this (e.g. we 'forget' the question)
are we able to find the correct answer. 3 is slightly more difficult than
1 because it also puts the search process at a particular solution node,
but because of it's dissimilarity to the correct solution, we are easily
able to recover from it.

R.Kohout