Using stuff that makes us dream less is bad. No?

In statistics, overfitting is “the production of an analysis that corresponds too closely or exactly [ONLY] to a particular set of data, and may therefore fail to… predict future observations reliably”.

This is important because “one of the hallmarks of human intelligence is generalization, the ability to adapt to novel situations”. But overfitting, by definition, makes generalization harder.

Dreams increase generalization

A recently published study on dreams argues that:

• the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain’s overfitting during its daily learning.
• dreams, that is, would be a biological mechanism for increasing generalizability
• sleep loss, specifically dream loss, leads to an overfitted brain that can still memorize and learn but fails to generalize appropriately

Wait a minute!

If all the assertions and definitions so far are correct, that is if the capability to generalize is an important part of intelligence, and dreams evolved to assist it during sleep…

…The effects of devices that reduce sleep are left as exercise for the still generalizing reader.

Related reading: The Flynn effect, and its possible end.