How does the human brain categorize memories and know if they were real events, fantasy or a lie?
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Some scientists think that our brains use sleep and dreams to help with this. The thought is our brains are like neutral networks, during the day when we’re experiencing reality, weights are being adjusted in the network (trained) to memorize or learn new things.
However the training isn’t perfect, weights are just adjusted, they’re not completely reset every time we learn something new or we’d forget all old stuff completely. Also our brains have limited capacity, and the physical topology of our neurons (how they’re wired together) affects the network.
To combat these problems, when we sleep, our brains do a negative training of sorts where it plays scenarios that it knows are false, and weights that agree with the scenario are weakened because they shouldn’t be there. This is also a type of compression, forgetting weak connections that aren’t important and only keeping ones that stand out as unique in positive training and pass the negative training well.
This would explain why we hallucinate and go whacky when we don’t sleep – our brains don’t get a chance to reset the weightings and after a while there are too many connections being used that shouldn’t be.
It also explains why we have trouble remembering our dreams, their whole purpose is to be erased.
I don’t know if any of this is true, it’s a theory I heard on a recent podcast Robot Brains and Geoff Hinton was talking about. It seems like it makes sense though and he explained it much better than I did.
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