The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization
I'm foreseeing impending downvotes but I have to rant somewhere. There should be a name for this kind of ridiculous hubris. Unfalsifiable non-insights by people trying to apply arbitrary deep learning algorithms to a brain which is definitely not using any of them. DLcentrism? We don't even know how the brain does almost <i>anything</i> and you think you can use trendy AI topics to explain something as complex and mysterious as dreams?<p>This reminds me of Matt Walker's terrible book on sleep, which, as with almost all neuroscience research recently, tries to explain "why" we have some behavioral pattern or experience, but literally never offers an explanation at all, opting to say "this region lights up in an fMRI machine", as if that answers anything at all. It's like if you asked "why does the heart pump blood?" and a cardiologist answered, "well, the heart is very important for exercise, and people with healthy hearts live longer, and when we attach electrodes to it we see these interesting patterns associated with pulse and breathing...". That's Matt Walker's book applied to the brain. This allows "neuroscience" to get away these ridiculously overextended papers, because you can't disprove anything about something so hard to understand in the first place.