Least Amount of Effort - nirgle.net

My new theory of dreaming will change pretty much everything, except of course the bedsheets which will still need to be done by hand. This new theory came to me rather suddenly, but ironically not while I was sleeping, like my theories usually do. I was actually just lying absolutely still on my couch after breakfast on Thursday, imagining myself freshly abducted onto an alien spaceship, right at the part where they defragment my brain in order to make the stealing of my thoughts and feelings a more efficient task. While strapped to the gurney under a floodlight, a big scientist alien leans over me and whispers the following...

The brain, like every organism, attempts to achieve a state in which the most amount of work can be done with the least amount of effort. You can certainly understand the concept of least amount of effort, can't you? Anyway, in the case of the brain, the "work" is simply the task of storing as much information about the environment as possible and accessing it as quickly as possible when the information is needed. How efficiently your brain meets these goals is the primary responsibility of the dreaming mind.

There is a general scientific agreement that there are two forms of memory: short-term, and long-term. The transferring of information into long-term memory is understood and documented enough. The dreaming mind takes over after a fresh wave of short-term information has been filed into long-term memory during non-REM sleep; that is, the period before dreaming.

The function of dreaming is to re-code information in long-term memory in order to keep the storage "footprint" as small as possible, which in turn minimizes the amount of energy required to keep the same amount of information remembered, and which speeds recall of the information. When you dream, your mind temporarily brings components of your past experiences into consciousness, mixes recent experiences with them, and sends them back into long-term storage. Every time your mind can encode new experiences on top of old ones, it is saving space and energy by storing more than one piece of information in approximately the same topographical area of memory. This is closely related to Freud's concept of condensation.

The amount and extent of dream activity will vary proportionally with the amount of new information you have taken in since the last time you dreamed. If you have had a particularly frantic day intellectually, whether because of studying hard in school or training for a new job, etc., you will likely have vivid, frantic dreams of the new experiences mixed in with prior experience, as your mind naturally locates the best configuration of the new information within the old.

Sorry, I need to get this. Yes? Oh, just got a new human, telling him some things. No, nothing classified. Well, not really. Oh, um, I don't know. Pepperoni, sausage, the usual. Yeah that's good. Oh wait, can one be vegetarian? Wonderful, thanks. Ok, thanks. Yes, bye.