Neuroscientist proposes AI-inspired theory for why we dream

Why we dream is one of science's most perplexing mysteries, but a neuroscientist in the US thinks he finally has the answer. Erik Hoel, a research assistant professor of neuroscience at Tufts University in Massachusetts, has taken inspiration from artificial intelligence (AI) for his theory. In a new report, he argues that the often hallucinogenic, nonsensical quality of dreaming is like throwing in new, unexpected data to a neural network. Professor Hoel calls this the'overfitted brain hypothesis' – and argues that it keeps human minds from'fitting too well to their daily distribution of stimuli'. This illustration represents the overfitted brain hypothesis of dreaming, which claims that the sparse and hallucinatory quality of dreams helps prevent the brain from'overfitting' to its biased daily sources of learning Neural networks are a subset of machine learning and are at the heart of deep learning algorithms.