Why are dreams so weird?
What is the purpose, if any, of dreaming and why are dreams so strange? A new theory suggests their peculiarity may be the service provided by dreaming to keep a brain on its toes. A new theory on the purpose of dreams has emerged, championed by Erik Hoel of Tufts University (Medford, MA, USA) and inspired by techniques used to train AI systems like deep neural networks. When deep neural networks are trained on a dataset, they can become incredibly attuned to the data responding to external prompts in exactly the way that the training data set would dictate. While...
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