Why did we evolve the inability to remember the time/point/experience of falling into sleep?
Why do we rarely remember our dreams?
Why is it that when we do remember bits of our dreams, we find these memories hardest to retain?
I would have thought that if we could retain our happy memories (our fantastic dreams) we would be happier people, and happier people would have a higher will to survive and therefore those people would be selected for survival by natural selection.
It could be that we’re much better at remembering our dreams than our ancestors.
It could be that remembering our dreams doesn’t make us happier.
It could be that being happier doesn’t make us have a “higher will to survive”.
It could be that having a higher will to survive doesn’t affect our actual chances of surviving much (though I doubt that).
In any case, I sometimes do remember the moments just before falling asleep. I don’t know if there’s much to remember immediately afterwards. It could be just a “blank”.
In general, my guess is that dreams are hard to remember because they’re pretty complex and inconsistent, and humans just aren’t that good at remembering complex things that don’t conform to a well-known pattern.
I remember an estimate of the time I fell to sleep. I check my watch habitually so it grants me this ability. I also remember that I have dreamt each time I wake up. I remember quite a few bits of my dream, too.
I also have very good memory in general, so who knows…
I’d say yeah, kinda. Being in a general state of happiness (except in very short bursts immediately after you do something to improve your chances of survival) is going to get selected out pretty quick. For an admittedly extreme example, I was reading about some scientists who surgically implanted an electrode into the pleasure center of a rat’s brain and then put a button that activated it in the rat’s cage. What invariably happened was the rats pushed that button as fast as it reset, stopping only for sleep, for the rest of their lives: they would actually starve to death in front of that button, even though their food dish was inches away.
That’s very flaky reasoning. Neither link seems particularly convincing to me (I am neither convinced that, to any significant degree, people who remember their dreams are happier nor that people who are happier experience greater reproductive success).
Anyway, it’s possible that the fact that dreams are hard to remember may be a byproduct of something else important with obviously significant evolutionary inertia.
Well, that has similar “This is awesome. Fuck everything else in life” qualities, I’m sure, but it’s hardly directly electrically tapping into whatever.
I am aware of falling asleep, sometimes. What happens is that I start seeing visions and going on thought tangents. Basically, the first thing I do when falling asleep is to start dreaming (at least the times that I end up aware of it). Probably most don’t remember this for the same reason they don’t remember all dreams.
As to why we don’t remember dreams… who knows. Maybe to keep our minds uncluttered. Maybe because learning lessons taken from a fantasy world can be counter-productive (maybe too many animals tried to see if they could fly, and evolution put a stop to it–remember, animals can’t even think “oh wait that happened in a dream”).
For what it’s worth, chemicals play a role in the remembering of dreams. Heavy marijuana users say they remember many of their dreams in the first days or weeks of abstaining. There might be a drug that’d let you remember all of them, if that’s really what you were into. I kind of think you’d end up feeling pretty disturbed.
Electrically tapping into whatever is the great unexplored frontier. Much more selective than chemicals, and quite the low-lying fruit. Expect civilization to go to shit as soon it gains prominence. Quite incredible it hasn’t already.
You can remember your dreams if you wake up early enough and you make a conscious effort to recall them. Put a note pad by next to your bed, and if possible, wake up not too long after your dream state. Then start to write down what happened in your dreams.
Perhaps brain function is decreased. i know brain waves vary in frequency during the different stages of sleep. maybe our brains just cant remember. like how your cant have your headlights on in your car if your changing the battery. if that metaphor makes any sense…
The current best guess about sleep is that the brain uses that time to reinforce synaptic connections that have been in use and disassemble those that haven’t been used much. This seems to be slightly more important to our survival and well-being than being able to remember how it felt to fly naked through your high school.
What time/point of falling into sleep do you think there is to remember? Sleep is not just an on/off switch or a binary condition. There are several types of bran activity associated with both wakeful and sleeping states and you vary between those on a regular basis. (I remember one particular biochemistry class in college was right after lunch, in a hot room, with a monotonous professor… pretty much everyone in that class was constantly moving along a spectrum between “awake” and “asleep”).
As for remembering dreams… no one really knows the purpose of dreams, or if there is a purpose. Dreams may be a quirky side effect of intelligence and therefore neither directly selected for or against in an evolutionary sense. For that matter, science can’t define exactly why we need to sleep; they only know that, yes, we do need it. One theory is that sleep/dreams are the process of moving the day’s activities from temporary storage into more permanent storage. If so, remembering your dreams would be counterproductive, since remembering them would require using the same memory circuits sleep is trying to clean out.
In any event, I don’t think there’s enough evidence on the purpose of sleep and dreams to talk about any natural selection pressures on them.
You’re looking at it the wrong way. You make it sound like evolution is a deliberate, guided process and therefore every feature of our physiology was designed.
Lots of things that have no real benefit or detriment just sort of happen. If they don’t have enough of an effect to affect our survival or breeding one way or another, evolution leaves them be.
That said, I don’t think the ability to remember falling asleep is all that useful for survival, so the trait isn’t selected for.
Total guess as to why we can’t remember that stuff - our brain tends to organize and strengthen memories as we sleep, so the normal memory center is busy doing stuff, and so our memories of falling asleep don’t get transferred to long term memory, and our dreams are perceived by part of a brain that doesn’t use memory in the same sense that our conscious mind does.
The current thought about dreams are they are the brains way of trying to make sense of random electrical impulses. Your brain whether it is a dog brain or a human brain (notice I didn’t say bird brain :)) is always receiving data, when it’s awake and it process it automatically as we learn. This is why for instance, you drive a car easily, but when you go to teach someone how to do it, you see how many steps are involved but we do without noticing it.
So when you sleep the brain is receiving all these random electrical impulses. The brain is used to processing data. So it makes some attempt to process them in a way that would make sense to us if we were awake. This is why dreams tend to be symbolic. The same way when we look at a group of clouds, which are just random, we still try to “see” things in that group of clouds
I had an interesting experience once. I laid down for a nap and let my mind wander until I fell into a very brief sleep. When roused back up I not only remembered the dream I was having, I could remember my entire train of thought into it from before falling asleep. The funny thing was that there was no definite transition into dream state: the wanderings of my thoughts just gradually got less and less focused and connected to reality until I was having a true, surrealistic, story-like dream.
Here’s what I think: The mind is a lot more “parallel” than we realize. Thoughts are continuously bubbling up, branching off, and wandering around in different parts of our brain. In some sense we are always “dreaming”. But we have a “consciousness module” that selects from this stew of thoughts, focuses, and “linearizes” it. Sleep turns down some function of the consciousness module that allows the thoughts to wander and interact more or less at random. Part of this (but not all) is a tuning-out of sensory input which would otherwise suppress irrelevant trains of thought.
It’s been shown that sleep is necessary for memory formation, but I don’t think dreams are involved in or result from that. Nor do I think they are adaptive. I think they are just a side effect of the way the brain works. Whether you remember them or not is random and of little consequence.
This from observing the progress of my Mom’s Alzheimer’s:
Long term memory, (LTM) and short term memory (STM) are totally different in the brain. By analogy, think RAM vs. HDD. STM is pretty volitile. Info there that doesn’t get used for a few minutes get’s flushed.
In Alzheimer’s patients, this is very obvious…they can tell you the name of thier third grade teacher, and name all the presidents up to the point where the disease took hold. They can carry on a conversation…actually pretty much the same conversation repeated every 5 minutes, because the STM never got moved to LTM.
There is some mechanism that transfers information in STM into LTM. In middle stage Alzheimer’s this gets broken. It can also be temporarly messed up by mental trauma (accident victem can’t recall what happened) and by sleep.
Just distractions will screw this up: When I drive long distances, I listen to books on tape. Typically I will have no memory of long empty stretches of road. If I forget to stop the tape in heavy traffic, I will have to rewind, because I won’t recall the plot that was covered when I was distracted by traffic.