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Dreams, mnemonics, and tuning for criticality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 November 2013

Barak A. Pearlmutter
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science and Hamilton Institute, National University of Ireland Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland. barak@cs.nuim.iehttp://www.bcl.hamilton.ie/~barak/
Conor J. Houghton
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, Bristol University, Bristol BS8 1UB, United Kingdom. conor.houghton@bristol.ac.ukhttp://www.bristol.ac.uk/engineering/people/conor-j-houghton/index.html

Abstract

According to the tuning-for-criticality theory, the essential role of sleep is to protect the brain from super-critical behaviour. Here we argue that this protective role determines the content of dreams and any apparent relationship to the art of memory is secondary to this.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

Pearlmutter, B. A. & Houghton, C. J. (2009) A new hypothesis for sleep: Tuning for criticality (2009). Neural Computation 21(6):1622–41.Google Scholar