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New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming

XzetaU8

Comments (147)

  • mr-wendel
    I was at my first real software job and we had an in-house system to provide automated installers for common open-source applications for our end-users. After I started getting familiar with it I had a dream one night that certain input fields (which were very common) could be rather easily exploited to inject shell commands with root access.I woke up convinced that it was a real bug, went to work the next day, and proved it. It was exactly as I dreamed. I never had access to our internal codebase, but had seen enough of the front-end and what we stored on disk to piece it together in my dream.While it made me popular with some folks, it was a strange lesson indeed to discover that not everyone was as thrilled to have an up-start from tech support make such a discovery.Fast forward almost 20 years later and I've never had anything even remotely close happen again.
  • ml_basics
    During my time at university studying pure mathematics I had an interesting experience of doing a challenging sheet of combinatorics problems during a vacation. Every day I attempted one question and got stuck on it. Then the next morning I woke up knowing the solution. It was a recurring thing: this happened every day for about 2 weeks until I had solved all the problems.For me this a big eye opener about the importance of sleep and relaxed thinking to solve challenging problems.
  • 8note
    "communicate" seems like the really interesting part of this, but gets a one-off mention only.like, how does this communication work? how does one sleeping person communicate skills to another sleeping person?have we found the mechanism? was it awake poeple communicating to sleeping people? the reverse?
  • vanviegen
    I once solved a particularly nasty bug, causing a c++ server to segfault in production about once a week, in a dream! The eureka adrenaline woke me up, and I rushed to my laptop to find the insight was real. I had been trying to comprehend that segfault for several long days. It wasn't the most restful night though.
  • markus_zhang
    Ah, very soon we will need to work in dreams. Can’t leave any stone of productivity unturned, right?
  • silentkat
    I regularly have abstract dreams I have trouble remembering. I wake up feeling like I understand problems better but I can't articulate why. However, I can indeed tackle problems from the day before more easily.It's pretty fascinating. What's even more fascinating is often times when I do remember the dream, a lot of it is nonsense. And yet I'm doing better at the things I dreamt about.
  • dgb23
    Aside, but I struggled a long time with regular sleep. I have been a night owl since I was a kid. I experience late hours as magical, don’t know how to describe it. So I always slept too little, then not at all, then drifting and sleeping in.But I somehow managed to have a regular schedule and now I start to sleep at 00:00-01:00 very often, sometimes even earlier.No idea how I managed to do that. I guess I just did improve many small things, like getting rid of bad habits, being more content, appreciating sleep more, prioritizing things differently.I wish everyone good, healthy sleep.
  • richstokes
    Kinda related but I used to practice guitar in my dreams. If I had been learning something I’d often dream about playing it over and over again, and even going beyond that and figuring out “solos” and melodies and stuff over the chord. Can’t be sure if it translated into any real life skill, but it felt like I was actually learning or at least strongly reinforcing what I’d been practicing.
  • block_dagger
    When I was beginning to use AI for everything, as most of us had, I would start dreaming that wall of text that had a personality sat between me and reality. For several nights I would dream this way with the wall becoming translucent and displaying text but the "real" actions (other people, scenes) was happening on the other side of the wall. I've dreamed in videogames as well. I'm not sure if I was getting any learning done, but I'm pretty sure my brain was exercising modes of thought that would push knowledge from "system 2" down into "system 1."
  • deferredgrant
    This is fascinating, but it feels like exactly the kind of topic where the effect size and reproducibility matter more than the headline. Dream research is very easy to oversell.
  • throwatdem12311
    This is why I would smash my head against a wall trying to beat a boss in Dark Souls for an entire evening, then wake up the next day and beat them on my first or second attempt.Very common phenomena that is discussed frequently in the souls community.
  • pedalpete
    Interesting comment they have towards the end about "targeted memory reactivation can disrupt sleep".It is important to note the study they are referring to is "targeted memory reactivation with sleep disruption", there are methods of doing targeted memory reactivation without sleep disruption.I work in neurotech/sleeptech as the founder of affectablesleep.com, and though we are mostly focused on slow-wave (deep) sleep, we have been looking into memory reactivation, lucid dreaming and other stimulations for additions.
  • Xeoncross
    AI does the work during the day and we learn while sleeping. Society doesn't collapse from ignorance. We have a new movie plot gentlemen.
  • rcarmo
    So I guess having dreams about recurring meetings is... honing corporate skills?
  • matthewfcarlson
    I read a short novel about a technology that allowed you to have a VR like experience while dreaming. Of course, there was all the fun/perverted stuff you can think of but also it was immediately put to use as a corporate tool. Over a few years, more and more white collar jobs shifted to night shifts where you worked via dream VR. Then people were available during the day to do whatever, watch their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. In many ways- it was a very promising future.
  • thenthenthen
    Two months ago my partner recorded me speaking in my sleep. I was speaking fluent Mandarin. I always thought sleep time is used for learning (among healing etc), but now I am convinced.
  • mahdihabibi
    This has always been clear as day to me, but I just couldn’t prove it. I used to take naps right after practicing guitar because I believed it would help me learn faster! LOL
  • jesse_dot_id
    Lucid dreaming is a cool concept but I've never been able to pull it off. I still try, though!
  • CrzyLngPwd
  • andai
    > In perhaps the most striking example of learning during sleep, Konkoly, Paller, and several collaborators witnessed what amounted to conversations with people who were in the midst of dreams. Independent lab groups in the U.S., France, Germany, and the Netherlands asked lucid dreamers to answer yes-or-no questions and solve simple math problems. Electrodes measuring body and brain activity verified that the participants were not awake. Martin Dresler, a sleep researcher at the Donders Institute, who ran the Dutch experiments, said that they were able to verbally deliver new information to the sleeping mind—and to receive responses. Some people could remember the questions they had been asked when they woke up. “This is a form of very complex learning,” he told me.https://xkcd.com/269/
  • brisket_bronson
    Omelette du fromage
  • nikolay
    This is nothing new as there's even a term for it - "hypnopedia." People used this widely to learn new languages in the past, but I'm not sure I've seen evidence about its effectiveness.
  • nomel
    Edison, famously, solved problems in a light dream state [1].[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thomas-edisons-na...
  • throwforfeds
    There's a long history of doing yogic practice in the dream state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_yoga
  • hughw
    While you're sleeping I'm practicing my skills. Enjoy being poor, suckers!
  • franze
    yeah i hate it when i work while sleepingMe: "I'm gonna plan the workshop tomorrow, more than enough time."7,5 h LaterBrain: "Hey, here is everything, worked the whole night, no need to thank me!!!"Me: "I need coffee..."
  • praveen4463
    I feel walking outside and thinking is a better way to practice skills and solve problems. A tired mind just sleeps and usually doesn't remember current events.
  • samtheDamned
  • jboggan
    My wife used to think that I had terrible sleep apnea because I'd repeatedly quit breathing for a minute or two at a time and then gasp for air, but it turned out I was just dreaming about freediving for lobsters.
  • petra
    Have anybody managed to use sleep to learn language? How ?
  • chaqchase
    Sounds like mental rehearsal more than magic. Interesting, but I'm not sure what to do differently day to day.
  • manoDev
    That’s why we say “let me sleep on it”.
  • ghm2180
    The newyorker has fascinating and well written medical stories. For example, Dhruv Khullar always writes amazing columns https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dhruv-khullar
  • varispeed
    My favourite part of coding is going to the park, sit on the bench and dream the problem. After a while, some times it needs several visits I write any code.Unfortunately most employers see this as slacking. It cannot be done in a noisy open plan office.At one place few other devs were into this. We would be spending most of the working day in the park. Managers were not happy, but work was delivered always.
  • anon291
    Srinivas Ramanujan famously said he did most of his work at night in dreams.As a total aside, I've had sleep issues my whole life and can sometimes inadvertently induce lucid dreaming, and then I can think for hours while sleeping; it's amazing. Unfortunately a bit inception-y, but whatever.
  • anon
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  • irishcoffee
    This happens to me both sleeping and awake. When I’m stuck on a problem and decide to walk away from it for a while, I subconsciously spin off a thread in my mind and move on to something else. The number of times I’ve had a eureka moment 3-5 hours later (not realizing I was even percolating on it) has to be in the hundreds.Happens probably twice a week when I sleep on the problem as well.To parlay this back to the current LLM craze, if we just export all our problems to some fuzzy non deterministic solver without ever trying to understand the problem, our collective brains will atrophy severely.I use the LLM my work pays for, sparingly, because I refuse to let that atrophy occur.
  • squibonpig
    It's gonna be really sad in 10-15 years when all the sc bros are hustling and grindsetting their dreams away.
  • davidw
    I remember when I first started dreaming in Italian... it was pretty cool though.
  • Svoka
    Reminds me of Echopraxia (Peter Watts book)
  • zombot
    Now there is no excuse anymore to be working less than 24 hours a day.
  • bethekidyouwant
    Where is the control group of regular dreamers exposed to the same sounds when in REM?Lucid dreaming is just an unusually awake form of dreaming. Not surprising that they can hear things especially the ones that can move their eyes left and right when prompted…The study should have simply been find people that can move their eyes left and right when prompted that still have REM brain waves tell them some random thing and see if they can remember it when you wake them up. I don’t know why that’s not completely obvious maybe it is and these guys are just grifters
  • nothinkjustai
    Hah and people still make the argument LLMs and brains work the same lol
  • takyamoto
    [dead]
  • redsocksfan45
    [dead]
  • tkfoss
    tl:dr "Andrillon warned against trying to harness the sleeping mind in the service of the waking world." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-024-00276-0
  • anon
    undefined
  • Rekindle8090
    [dead]
  • metalman
    There is no such thing as "should". The thing is possible, therefore humans will do it. The only question is, who is we?
  • econ
    After two weeks I woke up and didn't notice it was German tv. Eventually after 5 minutes an unknown word came along. I still can't speak it.When 13 i use to code till 1-2 am. In school I slept with my eyes open till 11. The information was stored and organized but I was unaware of it. I remember tests where all of the questions talked about topics I never spend a conscious thought on. But I knew all the answers. Quite the surreal experience.Teachers sometimes wondered if I was still in the room or they just asked questions. My mind would grep the most recent chunk of speech, parse it and respond as if nothing unusual was going on. The mind raced but I talked slowly to portray the slight delay more natural.I learned you don't want other people's bullshit in your head. It needs to be questioned first.