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Asked by wangchung9000 to Alan on 23 Mar 2011 in Categories: Your Research.
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Alan Winfield answered on 23 Mar 2011:
That’s a very good question. I would like to know the answer too! Because I build robots I have thought about a similar question – in order to make really really intelligent robots would we have to give them the ability to dream? Surprisingly the answer might be yes. We are already building some robots that have a computer simulation of themselves, inside themselves – it’s a kind of artificial imagination. It’s so that the robot can simulate what it’s going to do next before actually doing it – and so therefore not making a serious mistake and damaging itself or something (or someone) else. So if robots can have an imagination then, in a sense they should be able to dream too.
Although I haven’t answered your question I hope this helps a little.
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Comments
Diana commented on :
There are interesting studies that show what happens when you don’t dream. They’ve basically let people sleep, but woken them up when the REM stage starts (that’s the part where you’re dreaming). So the people aren’t just kept awake, but sleeping without dreaming. Within 3 days they are pretty much non functional. They have very little short term memory (things that just happened) and their short term memories don’t become long term memories (things that happened yesterday) and they do weird things like put their keys in the fridge and the orange juice in the cupboard. Some even act like their dreaming while awake. So, dreaming is pretty important to how we function. I’ve also seen studies that show that when people learn a lot, they dream more than on days when they are just playing. One theory is therefore that people dream to aid the process of moving short term memories into long term memories. Since we’re not really sure how we store memories, how we do that is still pretty vague.