Dream weavers

In Ursula LeGuin's amazing and disturbing novel The Lathe of Heaven, a very ordinary guy finds that he has a completely unordinary ability.

When he dreams, he wakes up and finds that whatever he dreamed has become reality.

George Orr, the protagonist, is terrified by this, as you might imagine.  It's not like he can control what he dreams; he isn't able to program himself to dream something pleasant in order to find he has it when he wakes.  No, it's more sinister than that.  Consider the bizarre, confusing, often frightening content of most of our dreams -- dreams that prompt you to say the next morning, "Where the hell did that come from?"

That is what makes up George's reality.

The worst part is that George is the only one who knows it's happening.  When his dream content alters reality, it alters everything -- including the memories -- of the people he knows.  When he wakes up and finds that the cityscape has changed and that some people he knew are gone, replaced with others he has never seen before, everyone else's memories changed as well.  George wakes to find he has a girlfriend, but she doesn't think it's sudden and weird; being George's girlfriend is what she remembers.

Only George sees that this is just the latest version of a constantly shifting reality.

So when he tries to explain to people what he can do, and (if possible) find a way to stop it, no one believes him.  No one... except a ruthless and ambitious psychiatrist who realizes that if he can figure out how to manipulate George's dreams, he can fashion a world to his own desires, using George as a tool to create the reality he wants.

LeGuin's terrifying vision of what happens when grasping amorality meets a naïve but useful skill is turning out not to be far from being realized.  George Orr's paranormal ability is the stuff of fiction, of course; but the capacity for influencing our dreams is not.

Nor, apparently, is the potential for using our dreams as a conduit for suggestions that might alter our behavior -- with or without our permission, possibly with or without our knowledge.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons stephentrepreneur, Hurtle Square dreams, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I found out recently from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia that there is a cohort of powerful corporations who have teamed up to see if there's a way to insert advertising content into our dreams.  Xbox, Coors, Microsoft, and Burger King, among others, have been experimenting on volunteers to see if they can introduce targeted advertising while we're asleep, and (especially) while we're at the neurologically hyperactive REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, in order to induce people to alter their behavior -- i.e., purchase the product in question -- once they wake up.  They've had some success; a test by Coors found that sixty percent of the volunteers were susceptible to having these kinds of product-based suggestions influence their dream content.

Forty sleep and dream researchers are now pushing back, and have drafted a document calling for regulation of what the corporate researchers are calling "dream incubation."  "It is easy to envision a world in which smart speakers—forty million Americans currently have them in their bedrooms—become instruments of passive, unconscious overnight advertising, with or without our permission," the authors state.

My fear is that the profit motive will outweigh any reluctance people might have toward having their dreams infiltrated by corporate content.  If cellular service providers were willing to give users a discount on their monthly fees, provided they agreed to allow themselves to be exposed to ads during the nighttime hours, how many people would say, "Sure, okay, go for it"?  I know for myself, I'm often willing to tolerate ads on games and video streaming services rather than paying extra to go ad-free.  I'd like to think that I'm able to tune out the ads sufficiently that they're not influencing my behavior, but what would happen if I'm exposed to them for all eight to ten hours that I'm sleeping every night?

Not all scientists are concerned about the technique's efficacy, however.  "Of course you can play ads to someone as they are sleeping, but as far as having much effect, there is little evidence," said Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University.  "Dream incubation doesn’t seem very cost effective compared with traditional advertising campaigns."

Even if it doesn't have the manipulative capability the corporations are hoping, the idea still scares the hell out of me.  When every moment of our days and nights become just another opportunity for monetization, where will it all stop?  "I am not overly concerned, just as I am not concerned that people can be hypnotized against their will," said University of Montreal dream researcher Tore Nielsen.  "If it does indeed happen and no regulatory actions are taken to prevent it, then I think we will be well on our way to a Big Brother state … [and] whether or not our dreams can be modified would likely be the least of our worries."

Which is it exactly.  As I've pointed out before, my main concern is about the increasing control corporate interests have over everything.  And here in the United States, the problem is that the people who could potentially pass legislation to limit what the corporations can get away with are being funded largely by corporate donors, so they're not anxious to put the brakes on and see that flow of cash dry up suddenly.  It's a catch-22 that would require the government to police its own behavior for no other reason than simple morality and ethics.

And you can guess how successful that is likely to be, especially considering the United States's current ethically-challenged administration.

I'm hoping that at least someone is listening, though. I tend to agree with Nielsen; I don't think our dream content will be as easily manipulable, or as behavior-altering, as the corporations hope.  But what I'm more worried about is that once we refuse to delineate a hard line around our personal lives, and say to them, "Here, and no further," we've opened ourselves up to there being no part of our personal space that isn't considered a target for monetization.

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Dream songs

Last night I dreamed that our local mall had been converted into a giant used book store.  (Something I would entirely approve of.)  We were going to to go shopping ("we" being my wife, me, and our younger son, who lives in Houston but was apparently up for a visit) but we realized that a bunch of other family members were unexpectedly going to descend upon us, and for some reason we knew they were going to walk into our house without knocking, which our dogs would not appreciate, so we had to get home fast.  But while trying to get out of the mall we were hindered by a bunch of science-fiction cosplayers wearing silver body paint.

After that, it got kind of weird.

Dreams are a very peculiar thing, but they (and the REM sleep stage during which they occur) are ubiquitous in the brainier species of animals.  In fact, as I'm writing this, my puppy Jethro is curled up in his bed by my desk dreaming about something, because his paws are twitching and every once in a while he makes a very cute little "oof" noise.  But what would a puppy dream about?  Presumably the things that make up his waking life -- playing, chasing squirrels, swimming in our pond, eating his dinner.

You have to wonder if sometimes dogs, like humans, have weird dreams, and what they might make of them.

The function of dreaming is unknown, but what's certain is that it's necessary.  Suppress REM and dreaming, and the results are hallucinations and psychosis.  Aficionados of Star Trek: The Next Generation will no doubt remember the chilling scene in the episode "Night Terrors," where something is preventing the crew from experiencing REM sleep, and Dr. Crusher is in the makeshift morgue where the victims of a massacre are being examined -- and when she turns around, all the dead bodies are sitting up, still shrouded in their sheets.  She closes her eyes -- exhibiting far more bravery than I would have -- and says, "This is not real," and when she opens them, they're all lying back down again.

*shudder*

In any case, what brings up this topic today is far cheerier; a fascinating piece of research out of the University of Buenos Aires that looked at dreams in an animal we usually don't associate with them -- birds.  A team led by Gabriel Mindlin looked at a species of bird called the Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus), a brightly-colored and vocal flycatcher found in much of Central and South America.  

Mindlin is one of the foremost experts in the physiology of bird song.  Birds have a unique apparatus called the syrinx that allows them to make some of the most complex vocalizations of any group of animals; not only can some (such as many wrens and thrushes) produce two or more tones at the same time, birds like parrots, mynahs, lyrebirds, and starlings are brilliant mimics and can imitate a variety of other sounds, including human speech.  (A lyrebird in a park in Australia learned to convincingly imitate a chainsaw, a car alarm, various cellphone ringtones, and a camera shutter.)

What Mindlin and his team did was to implant electrodes in the obliquus ventralis muscle, the main muscle birds use to control pitch and volume in vocalization, and also outfit some Great Kiskadees with devices to monitor their brain waves.  When the birds went into REM sleep, the researchers found that the OV muscle was contracting in exactly the way it does when the birds vocalize while awake.

The birds were singing silently in their sleep!

Singing in birds generally serves two purposes; mate attraction and territorial defense.  (As one of my AP Biology students put it, "they sing when they're mad or horny.")  It's more complicated than that -- science generally is -- but as a broad-brush explanation, it'll do.  Many species have different songs and calls for different purposes, each associated with a specific pattern of contractions and relaxation of the muscles in the syrinx.  Mindlin and his team used software capable of taking the muscle movements the electrodes detected and decoding them, determining what song the bird would have been producing if it was awake.  What they found was that the song their test subjects were dream-singing was one associated with marking out territories. 

"I felt great empathy imagining that solitary bird recreating a territorial dispute in its dream," Mindlin said.  "We have more in common with other species that we usually recognize."

So birds dream, and the content of their dreams is apparently -- just like Jethro -- taken from their own umwelt, the slice of sensory experience they engage with while they're awake.  (I wrote in more detail about the umwelt a while back, if you're curious.)  

On the other hand, how this accounts for my dream of silver-body-painted cosplayers in a mall filled with old books, I have no idea.

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Dream a little dream of me

In one of my favorite novels, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin, the main character -- an unassuming man named George Orr -- figures out that when he dreams, his dream changes reality.  The problem is, since when the change occurs, it alters everyone else's memories of what had happened, the only one who realizes that anything has changed is him.

At first, of course, he doesn't believe it.  He must be remembering wrong.  Then, when he becomes convinced it's actually happening, he starts taking drugs to try to stop him from dreaming, but they don't work.  As a last resort, he tries to get help from a psychologist...

... but the psychologist realizes how powerful this ability could be, and starts guiding George into dreams that will shape the world into what he wants it to be.

It's a powerful cautionary tale about what happens when an unscrupulous person gains control over someone with a valuable talent.  Power corrupts, as the oft-quoted line from John Dalberg-Acton goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I couldn't help thinking about The Lathe of Heaven when I read about some new exploration of lucid dreaming taking place at REMSpace, a California startup, that will be featured in a paper in The International Journal of Dream Research soon (a preprint is available at the link provided).  A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you're dreaming while you're dreaming, and often have some degree of control over what happens.  Around twenty percent of people report regular lucid dreaming, but there is some research that suggests many of us can learn to lucid dream.

Dickens's Dream by Robert W. Buss (1875) [Image is in the Public Domain]

At this point, I'll interject that despite a long history of very vivid dreams, I've never had a lucid dream.  I did have an almost-lucid dream, once; it was a weird and involved story about being a groomsman in a wedding in a big cathedral, and when the priest said the whole "does anyone have any objections?" thing, a gaudily-dressed old lady in the front row stood up and started shouting about what an asshole the groom was and how the bride could do way better.  And I'm standing there, feeling horrified and uncomfortable, and I thought, "This is bizarre!  How could this be happening?  Is this a dream?"  So I kind of looked around, then patted myself to reassure myself that I was solid, and thought, "Nope.  I guess this is real."

So the one time I actually considered the question of whether I was dreaming, I got the wrong answer.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the researchers at REMSpace took a group of test subjects who all reported being able to lucid dream, and hooked them up to electromyography and electroencephalography sensors -- which, respectively, measure the electrical discharge from voluntary muscle contractions and neural firing in the brain -- and gave them the pre-sleep suggestion that they would dream about driving a car.  Using the output from the sensors, they created a virtual avatar of the person on a computer screen, and found that they were able to use tiny motions of their hands to steer it, and even avoid obstacles.

"Two-way interaction with a computer from dreams opens up a whole area of new technologies," said Michael Raduga, who led the experiment.  "Now, these developments are crude, but soon they will change the idea of human capabilities."

Maybe so, but it also puts the dreamer in the hands of the experimenter.  Now, I'm not saying Michael Raduga and his team are up to anything nefarious; and obviously I don't believe anyone's got the George-Orr-like ability to change reality to conform to what they dream.  But does anyone else have the feeling that "two-way interaction" into your dreams is potentially problematic?  I've heard a lot of people say things like, "hypnosis isn't dangerous, you can't be given a post-hypnotic suggestion that induces you to do something you wouldn't ordinarily do," but if there's one thing my knowledge of neuroscience has taught me, it's that the human brain is highly suggestible.

So as interested as I am in lucid dreaming, I'm not ready to sign up to have my dreams interacted with by a computer controlled by someone else.  And I hope like hell that when Raduga and his group at REMSpace start "changing the idea of human capabilities," they are extremely careful.

Anyway, that's our interesting-but-a-little-scary research for today.  Me, I'm gonna stick with my ordinary old dreams, which are peculiar enough.  And given my failure at detecting a potentially lucid dream when I had the chance, I doubt I'd be all that good at it in any case.  I'd probably drive my virtual dream car right into a telephone pole.

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Dimensional analysis

As long-time readers of Skeptophilia know, it really torques my lug nuts when people take perfectly good scientific terms, re-define them however the fuck they like, and then pretend what they're saying makes sense.

The list of terms this has happened to is a long one, and includes frequency, resonance, quantum (lord, how they do love the word quantum), and vibration, to name a few.  But there's none that bothers me quite as much as the rampant misuse of the word dimension.

Part of the reason this one gets to me is that the concept of a dimension is so simple that you'd think it'd be hard to get wrong.  If you go to the Wikipedia article about the term, you will read in the very first line, "In physics and mathematics, the dimension of a mathematical space (or object) is informally defined as the minimum number of coordinates needed to specify any point within it."  The space we live in is three-dimensional because to define the location of a point, you need to know where it lies referent to three directions -- up/down, back/front, and right/left.

This hasn't stopped people from taking the term and running right off the cliff with it.  And it's not a new phenomenon.  I remember an episode of the abysmal 1960s science-fiction series (heavy on the fiction, light on the science) Lost in Space called "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension," wherein Will Robinson was kidnapped by a pair of evil aliens who looked like the love children of Matt Gaetz and Herman Munster.

These aliens told Will they were "from the fifth dimension," which makes about as much sense as if your Uncle Fred told you he was from "horizontal."  Be that as it may, after they captured Will they revealed to him their nefarious plan, which was to use his brain to power their spaceship.  Things looked bad, but Will defeated them by (I swear I am not making this up) feeling sad at them, which caused their spaceship to blow up.

So using the word "dimension" as a fancy way of saying "a mysterious place somewhere" goes back a long way.  But because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, I just read what has to be the single most ridiculous example of this I've ever seen.

And that includes "Invaders from the Fifth Dimension."

It's an article in Your Tango called "The Theory That Claims We Visit Other Dimensions While We Sleep," by NyRee Ausler.  Which brings up another misused word that really bothers me, which is "theory."  A theory is not "this crazy idea I dreamed up just now," and nor does it mean "a guess that could just as easily be right as wrong."  A theory is model with strong explanatory and predictive power, and which fits all the available data and evidence we have at hand.  When the creationists say, breezily, "Evolution is just a theory," that is not some kind of point in their favor; all it shows is that they have no idea what the word actually means.

After all, we call it "music theory" and that's not because we think music may not exist.

But I digress.

Anyhow, back to NyRee Ausler.  It will come as no shock to find out that she answers her question, "do we visit other dimensions while we dream?" with, "Yes, of course we do."  The way we know, she says, is that the laws of physics aren't the same in dreams as they are in reality.  I can vouch at least for that much.  I dreamed last night that I was out working in my garden, and I kept accidentally digging up plants and knocking things over and generally wreaking havoc, but then when I was done not only was everything back to normal, but all the flowers were blooming despite the fact that it's currently December and the high temperature today is supposed to be 13 F.

In any case, her point that "dreams are fucking weird" hardly needs further elucidation, but she goes on to say that the reason for all this is that dreams take place in another dimension.  And then she launches into a brief description of -- I shit you not -- string theory, which is a mathematical model of subatomic physics requiring ten spatial dimensions, all but three of which are thought to be (very) submicroscopic and "curled up."  The analogy commonly used is an ant on a garden hose -- it can go along the hose (one stretched-out dimension), or around the hose's circumference (one curled-up dimension).  The string theorists claim that three of the dimensions in our universe are of the stretched-out variety, and seven are curled up so tightly that we don't experience them on a macroscopic scale, but influence quantum phenomena such as how particles interact at very high energies. 

And yes, what NyRee Ausler is saying is that when you dream, you are somehow visiting these extremely tiny, curled-up dimensions, and that's why dreams are peculiar.  Once again, acting as if these extra dimensions were places, not just mathematical constructs describing spatial coordinates.

But it gets even better than that, because she goes on to tell us what each of those dimensions are like, one by one.  I direct you to the original link if you want to read about them all, but here's one, just to give you the flavor:

The sixth dimension consists of a straight line of possible worlds. Here, you get an opportunity to access all possible worlds that started with the same original conditions, like the Big Bang Theory.  It is known as the "phase space" in a set of parallel universes where everything that could have happened in our pasts, but did not, occurred in some other universe.  The sixth dimension exists in the same space and time as the one we occupy, an overlay of our universe or a 3-D space containing every possible world.

Right!  Exactly!  What?

What made me laugh the hardest is that she tried to give her article an extra soupçon of scienc-y-ness by mentioning Calabi-Yau manifolds, an extremely complex concept from higher-dimensional algebraic geometry, because lobbing in a technical term you obviously don't understand clearly strengthens your argument.

I know it's probably a waste of energy for me to spend my time railing about this, but there are people who will read this and think it's actual science.  And that bugs the absolute hell out of me.  The thing is, her article is not just wrong, it's lazy.  As I demonstrated above, all you have to do is to take the time to read the first paragraph of a damn Wikipedia page to see that what Ausler is claiming is blatant horse waste.

But science is hard, and technical, and to really understand it requires reading peer-reviewed journal articles and learning terminology and mathematics.  Easier to blather on about string theory and dimensions and (*snerk*) Calabi-Yau manifolds as if you knew what you were talking about, and hope that enough people click on the link that the ad revenue will pay for your groceries next month.

So anyhow, thanks to the reader who sent me the article.  I did get a couple of good laughs out of it, but the overall teeth-grinding I did while reading it probably resulted in net damage to my emotional state.  Pseudoscience will be with us always, springing up like mushrooms after a summer rain.  Or like my garden on a frigid day in December, at least in my sixth-dimensional dreams.

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Dream weavers

In Ursula LeGuin's amazing and disturbing novel The Lathe of Heaven, a very ordinary guy finds that he has a completely unordinary ability.

When he dreams, he wakes up and finds that whatever he dreamed has become reality.

George Orr, the protagonist, is terrified by this, as you might imagine.  It's not like he can control what he dreams; he isn't able to program himself to dream something pleasant in order to find he has it when he wakes.  No, it's more sinister than that.  Consider the bizarre, confusing, often frightening content of most of our dreams -- dreams that prompt you to say the next morning, "Where the hell did that come from?"

That is what makes up George's reality.

The worst part is that George is the only one who knows it's happening.  When his dream content alters reality, it alters everything -- including the memories -- of the people he knows.  When he wakes up and finds that the cityscape has changed and that some people he knew are gone, replaced with others he has never seen before, everyone else's memories changed as well.  George wakes to find he has a girlfriend, but she doesn't think it's sudden and weird; being George's girlfriend is what she remembers.

Only George sees that this is just the latest version of a constantly shifting reality.

So when he tries to explain to people what he can do, and (if possible) find a way to stop it, no one believes him.  No one... except a ruthless and ambitious psychiatrist who realizes that if he can figure out how to manipulate George's dreams, he can fashion a world to his own desires, using George as a tool to create the reality he wants.

LeGuin's terrifying vision of what happens when grasping amorality meets a naïve but useful skill is turning out not to be far from being realized.  George Orr's paranormal ability is the stuff of fiction, of course; but the capacity for influencing our dreams is not.

Nor, apparently, is the potential for using our dreams as a conduit for suggestions that might alter our behavior -- with or without our permission, possibly with or without our knowledge.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons stephentrepreneur, Hurtle Square dreams, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I found out yesterday from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia that there is a cohort of powerful corporations who have teamed up to see if there's a way to insert advertising content into our dreams.  Xbox, Coors, Microsoft, and Burger King, among others, have been experimenting on volunteers to see if they can introduce targeted advertising while we're asleep, and (especially) while we're at the neurologically hyperactive REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, in order to induce people to alter their behavior -- i.e., purchase the product in question -- once they wake up.  They've had some success; a test by Coors found that sixty percent of the volunteers were susceptible to having these kinds of product-based suggestions influence their dream content.

Forty sleep and dream researchers are now pushing back, and have drafted a document calling for regulation of what the corporate researchers are calling "dream incubation."  "It is easy to envision a world in which smart speakers—forty million Americans currently have them in their bedrooms—become instruments of passive, unconscious overnight advertising, with or without our permission," the authors state.

My fear is that the profit motive will outweigh any reluctance people might have toward having their dreams infiltrated by corporate content.  If cellular service providers were willing to give users a discount on their monthly fees, provided they agreed to allow themselves to be exposed to ads during the nighttime hours, how many people would say, "Sure, okay, go for it"?  I know for myself, I'm often willing to tolerate ads on games and video streaming services rather than paying extra to go ad-free.  I'd like to think that I'm able to tune out the ads sufficiently that they're not influencing my behavior, but what would happen if I'm exposed to them for all eight to ten hours that I'm sleeping every night?

Not all scientists are concerned about the technique's efficacy, however.  "Of course you can play ads to someone as they are sleeping, but as far as having much effect, there is little evidence," said Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University.  "Dream incubation doesn’t seem very cost effective compared with traditional advertising campaigns."

Even if it doesn't have the manipulative capability the corporations are hoping, the idea still scares the hell out of me.  When every moment of our days and nights become just another opportunity for monetization, where will it all stop?   "I am not overly concerned, just as I am not concerned that people can be hypnotized against their will," said University of Montreal dream researcher Tore Nielsen.  "If it does indeed happen and no regulatory actions are taken to prevent it, then I think we will be well on our way to a Big Brother state … [and] whether or not our dreams can be modified would likely be the least of our worries."

Which is it exactly.  As I've pointed out before, my main concern is about the increasing control corporate interests have over everything.  And here in the United States, the problem is that the people who could potentially pass legislation to limit what the corporations can get away with are being funded largely by corporate donors, so they're not anxious to put the brakes on and see that flow of cash dry up suddenly.  It's a catch-22 that would require the government to police its own behavior for no other reason than simple morality and ethics.

And you can guess how successful that is likely to be.

I'm hoping that at least someone is listening, though.  I tend to agree with Nielsen; I don't think our dream content will be as easily manipulable, or as behavior-altering, as the corporations hope.  But what I'm more worried about is that once we refuse to delineate a hard line around our personal lives, and say to them, "Here, and no further," we've opened ourselves up to there being no part of our personal space that isn't considered a target for monetization.

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In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Dream weaving

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Night Terrors," the ship gets trapped in a phenomenon called "Tyken's Rift," one of the myriad hand-waving scientific phenomena they came up with as plot devices.  It's some sort of rip in the space-time continuum -- I swear, given how often it rips in that show, you'd swear the space-time continuum was made of wet Kleenex -- and the upshot is that it causes a weird result for the crew.  They lose their ability to drop into REM sleep, so they're prevented from dreaming.

And it causes them to start hallucinating, and eventually, to go violently insane.  It'd happened to another ship, whose crew ended up killing each other.  This led to one of the single creepiest images the show ever came up with, while Dr. Crusher is in the morgue doing post-mortems on the dead crew members -- and is beginning to hallucinate herself.

There are a number of aspects of the episode that are pretty silly, but this one scene works brilliantly, mainly because it highlights exactly how surreal and terrifying dreams can be.  While you're inside them, they seem absolutely real.  In the last couple of years, I've had a number of dreams of being attacked by an animal -- odd in and of itself, because I always have gotten along with animals.  Dogs, in fact, like me a great deal better than people do.  But each time, I'm minding my own business, and some animal charges me, causing me to wake up, and more than once, to shout out, waking my poor long-suffering wife.

Why do I dream this stuff?  In fact, why does anyone dream what they do?  That's an interesting, and not an easy, question.  It brings to mind a topic that came periodically in my biology classes, involving the difference between proximal and ultimate causes.  In a proximal sense, we know that dreaming is caused by an activation of the visual and auditory cortices and a reduction in activity of the prefrontal cortex during REM sleep, triggering us to imagine vivid images and sounds while simultaneously shutting off one of the primary "reality filters" we have (explaining why dreams can seem to make sense while we're in them, and completely batshit insane once we wake up).

But when students asked "why do we dream?" that's not usually what they meant.  They were looking for a deeper, ultimate cause -- what purpose does it serve?  What is the overarching reason for dreaming?  And there, we go into what is largely uncharted territory.  Science, it turns out, is not so good at teleology -- the analysis of ultimate causes, explanations that don't just look at the mechanism, but the purpose or driver behind them.

This is why I was a little dubious about a paper by Erik Hoel of Tufts University that appeared in the journal Patterns last week.  Entitled, "The Overfitted Brain: Dreams Evolved to Assist Generalization," Hoel claims that his study of artificial intelligence/deep neural networks suggests that the purpose of dreams is to help us generalize what we've learned -- that our ordinary experience gives us limited ability to develop flexibility (i.e., we usually are confronted with the same stuff over and over again), so dreams interject a hefty dose of pure weirdness to help us learn to deal with the unexpected.

Hoel writes:

Understanding of the evolved biological function of sleep has advanced considerably in the past decade.  However, no equivalent understanding of dreams has emerged.  Contemporary neuroscientific theories often view dreams as epiphenomena, and many of the proposals for their biological function are contradicted by the phenomenology of dreams themselves.  Now, the recent advent of deep neural networks (DNNs) has finally provided the novel conceptual framework within which to understand the evolved function of dreams.  Notably, all DNNs face the issue of overfitting as they learn, which is when performance on one dataset increases but the network's performance fails to generalize (often measured by the divergence of performance on training versus testing datasets).  This ubiquitous problem in DNNs is often solved by modelers via “noise injections” in the form of noisy or corrupted inputs.  The goal of this paper is to argue that the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain's overfitting during its daily learning.  That is, dreams are a biological mechanism for increasing generalizability via the creation of corrupted sensory inputs from stochastic activity across the hierarchy of neural structures.  Sleep loss, specifically dream loss, leads to an overfitted brain that can still memorize and learn but fails to generalize appropriately. 

It's an interesting idea.  And I have to admit that the dream I had a few nights ago, wherein a horse jumped a fence and charged straight at me, hooves flying and teeth bared, is pretty fucking stochastic.  I am, however, a bit wary of any claim of the form "X is a widespread phenomenon, and it happens because of Y."  Complex phenomena -- which dreaming certainly is, given people's varied experience of it -- seldom have only a single proximal cause, much less a single ultimate cause.  And as I said, ultimate causes are notoriously tricky to identify anyhow.  Even some simpler questions to frame than dreaming -- such as why humans have upright posture -- have yet to be settled.  (Some suggestions are that it was to give us farther sight distance in the grasslands where we evolved, to leave our hands free to manipulate tools, that it made it easier to wade in order to gather aquatic organisms like shellfish for food, that it improved walking and running endurance, that it allowed our ancestors to reach fruit in trees more easily, that it made it easier for mothers to hold their infants while moving from place to place...  In point of fact, it could be any of these, all of these, or various other advantages not on the list, and it would be extremely difficult to discern which is correct.)

All of which is not meant to criticize Hoel's hypothesis specifically, because it's pretty intriguing.  I'm just always hesitant to jump to an appealing explanation just because "it sounds like it makes sense."  Reality is awfully complex, and explanations can be hard to come by.

But whatever the reason is, I'd sure like it if I could stop dreaming about being attacked by vicious animals.  My wife would like it, too.  Being awakened in the middle of the night because your husband is dreaming he's being attacked by a raging wombat kind of gets old after a while.

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Living the dream

A lucid dream occurs when you are aware you're dreaming while you're dreaming -- and (apparently) with practice, you can learn to control what happens.

Which sounds kind of awesome, but I've never had one.

I came close one time.  A while back I had a dream of being in a wedding party in a big old cathedral -- vaulted ceilings, stained glass, huge pipe organ, the works.  I don't recall recognizing the bride and groom, or (in fact) any of the other people present, but anyhow, there I was with other formally-dressed people, flanking the happy couple as they recited their vows.

When the priest got to the "if anyone objects to this marriage" bit, that's when things got weird.  An old lady in the front row stood up and said, "I object!" in a really nasal, grating voice.  She then began a recitation of how awful the bride and groom were, how she couldn't stand either of them, and how she was only there to let 'em both have it.  (You'd think, if both the bride and groom were horrible people, it'd be better to let them marry each other than to potentially ruin the lives of two other people, but apparently the old lady didn't see it that way.)

So I'm watching all this, aghast, and I had this sudden thought.  "This is so weird.  When does this ever happen in real life?  I must be dreaming."

I looked around, assessing the surroundings, and then kind of poked myself in the chest with my finger, and thought, "Huh.  I guess it's real after all.  How strange."

Doesn't it just figure?  I have my one and only opportunity to lucid dream, and when the time came to figure out if I was dreaming, I got the wrong answer.

Dickens's Dream by Robert Buss (1875) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The subject comes up because of a study led by Karen Konkoly, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, which describes research done into people having lucid dreams -- and the potential for communicating with dreamers and having them answer questions or even follow simple commands.

The authors write:

Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience.  These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained.  Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming.  Here we show that individuals who are asleep and in the midst of a lucid dream (aware of the fact that they are currently dreaming) can perceive questions from an experimenter and provide answers using electrophysiological signals.  We implemented our procedures for two-way communication during polysomnographically verified rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep in 36 individuals.  Some had minimal prior experience with lucid dreaming, others were frequent lucid dreamers, and one was a patient with narcolepsy who had frequent lucid dreams.  During REM sleep, these individuals exhibited various capabilities, including performing veridical perceptual analysis of novel information, maintaining information in working memory, computing simple answers, and expressing volitional replies.  Their responses included distinctive eye movements and selective facial muscle contractions, constituting correctly answered questions on 29 occasions across 6 of the individuals tested.  These repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be interrogated in real time.  This relatively unexplored communication channel can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.

It's a cool finding, but not that surprising when you think about it.  A lot of us have had experiences where outside (i.e. real) sounds have become incorporated into our dreams.  My wife once had a dream of hearing NPR, but when she checked, it wasn't coming from our stereo speakers.  So she wandered around the house, and finally found that it was coming from the microwave.  But unplugging the microwave still didn't shut off the news broadcast, and she proceeded to go from appliance to appliance, trying to figure out why our house had the ghostly voices of Doualy Xaykaothao and Ofebia Quist-Arcton and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson coming out of nowhere.

Then she woke up, and found that her clock radio was on, and the news broadcast had become incorporated into her dream state.

Which, of course, brings up another, and more pressing question: why do NPR reporters have such awesome names?  I don't know anyone in real life who has a name as cool as Kai Ryssdal, Nedda Ulaby, and David Folkenflik.  I wonder if it's a condition of employment?

NPR interviewer: I'm happy to see that you've applied for a job as a reporter here at NPR.  What's your name?

Me:  Gordon Bonnet.

NPR interviewer:  Oh, I'm sorry, that's not nearly cool enough.  Maybe you should see if MSNBC has any openings.

But I digress.

The lucid dreaming experiment definitely is cool, but it does open up some rather scary potential.  One of my favorite novels is Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, which involves a man named George Orr who not only has lucid dreams, his dreams change reality.  If he dreams that there was a plague five years ago that wiped out half the world's population, when he wakes up, that's what's happened.  The problem is, no one realizes the change but him.  When the past changed, everyone's memory changed as well, so George is the only person who recognizes that things are different.  Of course, any psychologist he tries to tell this is going to think he's crazy; the psychologist's memory changed along with everyone else's.  But one psychologist believes him -- and realizes that he can use George's peculiar power to reshape the world as he sees fit, by giving George suggestions while he's sleeping.

After that, things go downhill fast.

While the dream-changing-reality ability in LeGuin's incredibly inventive story isn't real, you have to wonder if other things might be.  Could a suggestion during a lucid dream change your memories, or create a memory of something that never happened?  Could it be used to overcome psychological issues like phobias -- or induce aversions where there were none previously?  Any time I hear about people trying to tap into the subconscious mind, it always gives me pause -- because being subconscious, we would very likely be at the mercy of whoever is controlling the experiment, just like the unfortunate George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven.

In any case, it's a compelling study about a topic I've always found fascinating.  As Konkoly et al. point out, we still don't know why people -- and apparently, other animals -- dream, but its ubiquity suggests that it serves some important purpose.  Not only that, we know that blocking REM sleep fairly quickly leads to hallucinations and psychotic symptoms, so whatever dreaming is doing for us, it's evidently critical for our mental health.

The Konkoly et al. study is only a first foray into this topic, so I'll be looking for more research springboarding off their findings.  I'm wondering if it might be possible for people who don't lucid dream to learn how.  I've seen advertisements for devices that are supposed to clue in the sleeper that (s)he is dreaming, and allow for learning how to control the internal dream state -- one I recall is a headband with an LED that activates when you go into REM -- but I haven't seen any particularly convincing evidence that they work.  It'd be cool if they did, though.  I'd love to learn to lucid dream.  Think of the fun you could have!  To start with, I could have told the old lady in the cathedral to shut up and sit down.  That'd have been nice, at least as a start.

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 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Android dreams

In the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "Phantasms," the android Commander Data continues to pursue his lifelong dream of experiencing what it's like to be human by creating a "dream program" -- a piece of software that activates when he sleeps, allowing him to go into a dreamlike state.  The whole thing goes seriously off the rails when he starts having bizarre nightmares, and then waking hallucinations that spur him to attack the ship's counselor Deanna Troi, an action that leaves him relieved of duty and confined to his quarters.

Of course, being Star Trek, the whole thing has to do with aliens, but the more interesting aspect of the story to me is the question of what an artificial intelligence would dream about.  We've yet to figure out exactly why dreaming is so important to our mental health, but it clearly is (this was the subject of what might be the single creepiest TNG episode ever, "Night Terrors").  Without REM sleep and the dreams that occur during it, we become paranoid, neurotic, and eventually completely non-functional; ultimately we start hallucinating, as if the lack of dreams while we're asleep makes them spill over into our waking hours.

So being that the question of why exactly we dream isn't satisfactorily solved, it's going even further out onto a limb to ask what a different intelligence (artificial or otherwise) would dream about, or even if they'd need to dream at all.  Our own dreams have a few very common themes; just about all of us have dreams of being chased, of being embarrassed, of stressful situations (like the "teaching anxiety" dreams I used to have, usually involving my being in my classroom and having my students misbehaving no matter what I tried to stop it).  I still get anxiety dreams about being in a math class in college (it's always math, for some reason), and showing up to find I have an exam that I haven't studied for.  In some versions, I haven't even attended class for weeks, and have no idea what's going on.

Grieving or trauma can induce dreams; we often dream about loved ones we've lost or terrifying situations we've been in.  Most of us have erotic dreams, sometimes acting out situations we'd never dream of participating in while awake.

So although the content of dreams is pretty universal, and in fact shares a lot with the visions induced by psychedelic drugs, why we dream is still unknown.  So it was with considerable curiosity that I read a paper that showed up in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness this month called, "Neural Network Models for DMT-induced Visual Hallucinations," by Michael Schartner (Université de Genève) and Christopher Timmermann (University College London), who took an AI neural network and introduced input to it that mimicked the kind of endogenous (self-created) visual input that occurs during a hallucination, and watched what happened.

The authors write:

Using two deep convolutional network architectures, we pointed out the potential to generate changes in natural images that are in line with subjective reports of DMT-induced hallucinations. Unlike human paintings of psychedelic hallucinations—the traditional way to illustrate psychedelic imagery—using well-defined deep network architectures allows to draw parallels to brain mechanisms, in particular with respect to a perturbed balance between sensory information and prior information, mediated by the serotonergic system.

In our first model, NVIDIA’s generative model StyleGAN, we show how perturbation of the noise input can lead to image distortions reminiscent of verbal reports from controlled experiments in which DMT has been administered.  In particular, the omission of noise leads to a smoother, painterly look of the images, illustrating a potential hypothesis that can be conceptualized with such models: as a 5-HT2A receptor agonist, DMT induces a state in which environmental (i.e. exogenous) sensory information is partially blocked—gated by the inserted noise—and system-internal (endogenous) signals are influencing conscious imagery more strongly.  Contents of immersive imagery experienced in eyes-closed conditions during DMT administration would thereby correspond to the system’s prior information for the construction of a consciously perceived scene.

If you're ready for some nightmares yourself, here's one of their images of the output from introducing psychedelic-like noise into the input of a face-recognition software:

For more disturbing images that come out of giving AI hallucinogens, and a more in-depth explanation of the research than I'm giving here (or am even capable of giving), I direct you to the paper itself, which is fascinating.  The study gives a new lens into the question of our own consciousness -- whether it's an illusion generated by our brain chemistry, or if there really is something more there (a soul, spirit, mind, whatever you might want to call it) that is in some sense independent of the neural underpinning.  The authors write:

Research on image encoding in IT suggests that ‘the computational mission of IT face patches is to generate a robust, efficient, and invariant code for faces, which can then be read-out for any behavioural/cognitive purpose downstream’ (Kornblith and Tsao 2017).  The latent information entering the NVIDIA generative model may thus be interpreted as activity in IT and the output image as the consciously perceived scene, constructed during the read-out by other cortical areas.  How this read-out creates an experience is at the heart of the mind-body problem and we suggest that modelling the effects of DMT on the balance between exogenous and endogenous information may provide experimentally testable hypotheses about this central question of consciousness science.

All of this points out something I've said many times here at Skeptophilia; that we are only beginning to understand how our own brains work.  To quote my friend and mentor, Dr. Rita Calvo, Professor Emeritus of Human Genetics at Cornell University, with respect to brain science we're about where we were with respect to genetics in 1921 -- we know a little bit about some of the effects, and a little bit about where things happen, but almost no understanding at all about the mechanisms that are driving the whole thing.  But with research like Schartner and Timmermann's recent paper, we're finally getting a glimpse of the inner workings of that mysterious organ that lies between your ears, the one that is allowing you to read and understand this blog post right now.

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I'm always amazed by the resilience we humans can sometimes show.  Knocked down again and again, in circumstances that "adverse" doesn't even begin to describe, we rise above and move beyond, sometimes accomplishing great things despite catastrophic setbacks.

In Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Hidden Order of Life, journalist Lulu Miller looks at the life of David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist whose fascination with aquatic life led him to the discovery of a fifth of the species of fish known in his day.  But to say the man had bad luck is a ridiculous understatement.  He lost his collections, drawings, and notes repeatedly, first to lightning, then to fire, and finally and catastrophically to the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which shattered just about every specimen bottle he had.

But Jordan refused to give up.  After the earthquake he set about rebuilding one more time, becoming the founding president of Stanford University and living and working until his death in 1931 at the age of eighty.  Miller's biography of Jordan looks at his scientific achievements and incredible tenacity -- but doesn't shy away from his darker side as an early proponent of eugenics, and the allegations that he might have been complicit in the coverup of a murder.

She paints a picture of a complex, fascinating man, and her vivid writing style brings him and the world he lived in to life.  If you are looking for a wonderful biography, give Why Fish Don't Exist a read.  You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Reality, nightmares, and the paranormal

I was giving some thought this morning to why I've turned into such a diehard doubter of paranormal occurrences.  And I think one of the main reasons is because I know enough neuroscience to have very little faith in my own brain and sensory organs.

I'm not an expert on the topic, mind you.  I'm a raving generalist, what some people describe as "interested in everything" and more critical sorts label as a dilettante.  But I know enough about the nervous system to have taught a semester-long elective in introductory neuroscience for years, and that plus my native curiosity has always kept me reading about new developments.

This is what prompted a friend of mine to hand me the late Oliver Sacks's book Hallucinations.  I love Sacks's writing -- The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Musicophilia are tours de force -- but this one I hadn't heard of.

And let me tell you, if you are the type who is prone to say, "I know it happened, I saw it with my own eyes!", you might want to give this book a read.

The whole book is a devastating blow to our confidence that what we see, hear, and remember is reality.  But the especially damning part began with his description of hypnopompic hallucinations -- visions that occur immediately upon waking.  Unlike the more common hypnagogic experiences, which are dreamlike states in light sleep, hypnopompic experiences have the additional characteristic that when you are in one, you are (1) convinced that you are completely awake, and (2) certain that what you're seeing is real.

Sacks describes one of his own patients who suffered from frequent hypnopompic hallucinations.  Amongst the things the man saw were:

• a huge figure of an angel
• a rotting corpse lying next to him in bed
• a dead child on the floor, covered in blood
• hideous faces laughing at him
• giant spiders
• a huge hand suspended over his face
• an image of himself as an older man, standing by the foot of the bed
• an ugly-looking primitive man lying on the floor, with tufted orange hair

Fortunately for him, Sacks's patient was a rational man and knew that what he was experiencing was hallucination, i.e., not real.  But you can see how if you were even slightly inclined to believe in the paranormal, this would put you over the edge (possibly in more than one way).

But it gets worse.  There's cataplexy, which is a sudden and total loss of muscular strength, resulting in the sufferer falling to the ground while remaining completely conscious.  Victims of cataplexy often also experience sleep paralysis, which is another phenomenon that occurs upon waking, and in which the system that is supposed to re-sync the voluntary muscles with the conscious mental faculties fails to occur, resulting in a terrifying inability to move.  As if this weren't bad enough, cataplexy and sleep paralysis are often accompanied by hallucinations -- one woman Sacks worked with experienced an episode of sleep paralysis in which she saw "an abnormally tall man in a black suit...  He was greenish-pale, sick looking, with a shock-ridden look in the eyes.  I tried to scream, but was unable to move my lips or make any sounds at all.  He kept staring at me with his eyes almost popping out when all of a sudden he started shouting out random numbers, like FIVE-ELEVEN-EIGHT-ONE-THREE-TWO-FOUR-NINE-TWENTY, then laughed hysterically."

After this the paralysis resolved, and the image of the man "became more and more blurry until he was gone."

Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare (1790) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there are grief-induced hallucinations, an apparently well-documented phenomenon which I had never heard of before.  A doctor in Wales, W. D. Rees, interviewed three hundred people who had recently lost loved ones, and found that nearly half of them had at least fleeting hallucinations of seeing the deceased.  Some of these hallucinations persisted for months or years.

Given all this, is it any wonder that every culture on Earth has legends of ghosts, demons, and spirits?

Of course, the True Believers in the studio audience (hey, there have to be some, right?) are probably saying, "Sacks only calls them hallucinations because that's what he already believed to be true -- he's as guilty of confirmation bias as the people who believe in ghosts."  But the problem with this is, Sacks also tells us that there are certain medications which make such hallucinations dramatically worse, and others that make them diminish or go away entirely.  Hard to explain why, if the ghosts, spirits, et al. have an external reality, taking a drug can make them go away.

But the psychics probably will just respond by saying that the medication is making people "less attuned to the frequencies of the spirit world," or some such.  You can't win.

In any case, I highly recommend Sacks's book.  (The link to the Amazon page is posted above, if you'd like to buy a copy.)  It will, however, have the effect of making you doubt everything you're looking at.  Not that that's necessarily a bad thing; a little less certainty, and a little more acknowledgement of doubt, would certainly make my job a hell of a lot easier.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is about one of the deepest mysteries in science: the origin of time.

Most physical processes are time-reversible.  If you looked at a video of a ball bouncing off a wall, then looked at the same video clip in reverse, it would be really difficult to tell which was the forward one and which the backwards one.  Down to the subatomic level, physical processes tend to make no distinction based upon the "arrow of time."

And yet our experience of time is very, very different.  We remember the past and don't know anything about the future.  Cause and effect proceed in that order, always.  Time only flows one direction, and most reputable physicists believe that real time travel is fundamentally impossible.  You can alter the rate at which time flows -- differences in duration in different reference frames are a hallmark of the theory of relativity -- but its direction seems to be unchanging and eternal.

Why?  This doesn't arise naturally from any known theory.  Truly, it is still a mystery, although today we're finally beginning to pry open the door a little, and peek at what is going on in this oddest of physical processes.

In The Order of Time, by physicist Carlo Rovelli (author of the wonderful Seven Brief Lectures in Physics), we learn what's at the cutting edge of theory and research into this unexplained, but everyday and ubiquitous, experience.  It is a fascinating read -- well worth the time it will take you to ponder the questions it raises.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

In your wildest dreams

So, last night, this weird thing happened.  I was skinnydipping in the Caribbean, swimming along trying to get to the other side, when I noticed some people on a boat following me.  They started yelling at me, not (surprisingly) to ask why I was out in the middle of the ocean, but to let me know that there was a hurricane coming and I'd better swim faster because otherwise I wouldn't reach Senegal (which is apparently on the "other side of the Caribbean") in time to avoid drowning in the storm.  They then motored off to get to safety themselves.  It never crossed my mind to wonder why, if the situation was so dire, they hadn't hauled me aboard.  Maybe it was because they were embarrassed by the fact I was naked and they didn't have an extra pair of swim trunks, although I don't remember being much bothered by the fact myself.  Or maybe it was because I'd apparently gotten out there myself, I could damn well get myself out of it, and they'd done their duty by at least letting me know that I was about to be in the middle of a cyclone.

I don't remember what happened after that.  I think it got a little weird.

Somewhere along the way, I woke up, and in the words that every bad fantasy writer has written at some point, "He realized it was only a dream."  Lying there in the dark, I started wondering why my errant brain had come up with something that odd, and came to the conclusion that it was an amalgam of various things over the last few days, like the NOAA bulletin I read saying we were likely to have an above-average year for dangerous hurricanes, and looking at some photos someone posted on Twitter from West Africa.  The skinnydipping part at least makes a modicum of sense because I love to swim but kind of hate swearing swim trunks.  Fortunately I have a pond that's in the privacy of my fenced back yard and only visible from the road if you look exactly in the right direction at exactly the right time, and my opinion is if someone's that determined to see my bare ass, they can have at it.  (Of course, given the way the weather's currently going in the Northeast, it'll probably be August before I'd be willing to swim without a fully-insulated dry-suit, much less naked.)

And for the record, this dream still wasn't as completely fucked up as my wife's dream a couple of nights ago about being tackled by an enormous kangaroo, or the one last night where she had rented an apartment in Washington D.C. but was dismayed to find that it had no door, and the only way you could get in was by climbing through the mail slot.

Apparently even King Solomon had some weird dreams, because I don't know what the hell this is about.  Luca Giordano, The Dream of Solomon (1694) [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this comes up because of a paper this week in Cell Reports about a study of two epileptic patients who had implants to monitor their brain activity.  These electrodes were supposed to act as neuromuscular interfaces, allowing the individuals to overcome motor paralysis and move their arms simply by thinking about it, but along the way the devices made sensitive readings of neural firing patterns.  And what the researchers found was that when the patients went into the REM (rapid eye-movement) phase of sleep, during which we dream, the brain was apparently replaying firing patterns for motor control that had been learned the previous day.

So the researchers had the patients play a mental game of "Simon" -- remember the popular electronic toy where you had to press buttons to repeat a pattern of sounds and colors?  Of course, given these individuals' disabilities, they couldn't play the actual game, so the scientists instructed the patients to think through and recall the pattern they'd just seen, picturing themselves pushing the buttons in the correct order.

Then the patients took a nap.  And during REM, the same pattern emerged as they'd seen during the mental game.

Apparently, they were playing Simon in their dreams.

My wife had an experience like this back when she was in graduate school, and engaged in the occupation that all serious grad students take part in, namely: playing video games instead of studying.  In her case, it was Tetris, and she finally realized she was spending way too much time playing it when she started having Tetris dreams.

But evidently this is something we all do, and gives us a lens into why we dream in the first place.  It's long been thought that dreaming has to do with memory consolidation -- reinforcing pathways that the brain has decided are important, moving critical memories into long-term storage, and pruning away information that is less essential.  Your brain makes the understandable (if sometimes erroneous) judgment that if you repeat an activity a bunch of times, it must have some survival value, and you replay it while you sleep so you can do it more fluidly when you're awake.

Even if all you're practicing is your ability to stack up bunches of colored blocks while vaguely Russian-sounding music plays in the background.

"This study is fascinating," said Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who was not involved in the study, in an interview with CNN.  "Despite decades of research, it remains somewhat unclear how 'short-term' memories get filed away to become 'long-term' memories that can be recalled later.   Using a brain-computer interface is an exciting way to study memory since it can record brain cell activity patterns and then look for those exact patterns later...  This supports the notion that in order to optimize memory function and learning, people need to prioritize restful activities -- most importantly adequate sleep -- to keep our 'engines' running at peak performance."

Which is fascinating, but hardly news to chronic insomniacs like myself.  I know that after a night's poor sleep, everything -- memory, motor responses, mood, sensory awareness -- is affected negatively.  The restorative power of sleep is well-documented, and absolutely essential to health, both physical and mental.

What this study does, though, is to pinpoint one of the ways sleep helps us -- by reinforcing our memory of critical events from the previous days.  We already knew why dreams are so bizarre; during REM, the prefrontal cortex -- which among many other things, acts as a sort of "reality filter," allowing you to sift fact from fantasy -- is essentially offline.  Apparently the memory consolidation function works best when you can get the hypercritical "Okay, that is clearly not real" part of your brain out of the way.

But I still don't think it can explain why I was swimming toward Senegal, naked, during a hurricane.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

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