Black Boxes II

I said that sleep carries forward the learning process begun during our waking intervals. Let's see now what that must involve.

1. New behaviors. If a person is called upon during the day to develop a new behavior, sleep should carry this process forward as far as it can without further daytime experience. Remembering that even when faced with new situations, we respond on the basis of past experience, we can see that the work of sleep should be involved partially with knitting established behaviors into new routines in a more coordinated way than was possible during the day. Involvement also should take the form of including routines from the past that weren't available during the day.

2. Forgetting. Memories seem to fade gradually, rather than disappearing all of a sudden. Part of the problem is an increasing difficulty at recall. A person's name becomes gradually more difficult to bring to mind without use of the name in recent intervening waking intervals. Yet eventually we are able to dredge it up, showing that it was there all along; we simply couldn't make contact with it. The same kind of thing is true of skills, too. Remembering that skills are a coordinated set of component behaviors, some of the components seem to drop out of the chain with disuse, and coordination seems to frazzle. It could be also that some of the components lose an attribute or two.

The notion that sleep is involved in the development of new behaviors implies that it must also be involved with the forgetting of others. This can be seen from the fact that many new behaviors must be established on the same neural networks responsible for previously established behaviors. Establishing new behaviors could therefore involve facilitating different pathways, resulting in interferences to the recall of established behaviors. Other facilitations could be involved in losses of coordination.

3. Flexibility. We live complicated lives--no two waking intervals are exactly the same. A learning process based on the specifics of the previous waking interval could therefore not be ideal, since that exact set of circumstances will not be met ever again. What a person needs is not a rigidly coordinated set of behaviors, but behaviors that flexibly coordinated, in the sense that the person possesses easy access to related alternative responses that will help in meeting variances in what happened before. Therefore, sleep must act to broaden the perspective of the learning process.

4. Motives. Sleep must also have a motivational role. In one way or another, all of our motives have ties to our social interactions and ultimately to our interactions with our parents in childhood. Sleep must participate in providing us with the motives to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities to be found in the next waking interval, and do so in a way that is ultimately reconciled with the concept of reality developed during childhood.

5. Life direction. I have said that our black boxes in some mysterious way can be thought of as determining our needs as individuals. I relate that position now to a choice in life direction. Since we have the "freedom" to screw up and not satisfy those needs, the imperatives responsible for defining the needs cannot be fully formed at birth or even during childhood. In fact, they cannot mature independently of experience, but develop as a dynamic melding of learning and genetic structure. With each waking interval, we learn a little more about ourselves and others, and this shapes our aspirations, causing them to change over time. Sleep must be involved with this process, too.

This brings us to the question of how, generally speaking, can sleep perform all this. Mammalian sleep consists of several stages, as defined by the waveforms found in EEG tracings. A Stage 1 EEG associated with rapid eye movements (REMs) and motor inhibition indicate the REM state. In addition to this, there are four non-REM (NREM) stages and a few sleep-onset stages. Typically, sleep begins with about 1-1/2 hours of NREM sleep, which is brought to an end by the appearance of a short (5-15 minute) REM episode. The approximate 1-1/2 hour cycling is maintained throughout sleep, with the REM episodes becoming longer and the NREM periods becoming shorter. The first two periods of NREM sleep show a good deal of Stages 3 and 4 and relatively little Stage 2. As sleep continues, the relative amount of Stage 2 sleep increases at the expense of Stages 3 and 4. Stages 3 and 4 are generally thought of as "deep" sleep.

Sleep presumably serves many biological functions. Nevertheless, it will be assumed here that learning is important enough to us--the most adaptable of all animals--that to a first approximation we can consider the progression through sleep stages as being regulated by learning needs alone.

The mammalian REM state has received considerable scrutiny from researchers, and the most direct interpretation of that data, taken as a whole, is that the REM state is an instance in which information is being experienced in a literal sense. That is, during the REM state, certain black boxes output information in such a way that the other black boxes interpret and react to it as if it were sensory input derived from waking events.

Let's now put everything together. During the first non-REM interval, dominated by NREM Stages 3 and 4, a person develops a set of adaptations based closely on the particular experiences that occurred during the previous waking interval. These adaptations are also tainted by the inherent sloppiness of coarse coding. If sleep were to end there, the person would face two problems: the adaptations would be imprecise and would be cued and tailored to sensory indications too closely tied to the events of the previous waking interval.

To get around both of these problems, we do not awaken, but rather move to test the "solutions" arrived at during non-REM sleep by experiencing those solutions in the real world of our memory so that we can subject those solutions to constraint satisfaction. In other words, by experiencing our solution, we evoke memories that sharpen our adaptations and make them appropriate to a wider set of experiences than occurred the previous day. These evoked memories do not participate in the manifested dream, but merely accumulate as a mounting "critical reaction" to the ongoing REM dream, criticism which causes us to return to non-REM sleep so that we can come up with a new adaptive solution that includes this new information. This new solution is then experienced and criticized, and the process begins again until finally we awaken with finely honed adaptations in mind.

I believe that the motivational components of these adaptations operate in the next waking interval much like a set of hypnotic suggestions. I believe--and there is some supporting evidence--that there is a physiological relationship between the hypnotic state and the REM state.

It may seem strange that we experience our REM dreams in a literal sense, but we actually do much the same sort of thing during our waking moments, too. I refer to manifestations we experience as conscious inner events.

The subject of consciousness can easily lead one to profound considerations, but we will avoid all of that by taking an extremely narrow focus. For the purposes of psychology, it is all we will need. The aspect of consciousness I will consider is what small boys focus on when they catch a fish and ask whether the fish feels pain as it flips about at the end of a hook. The question is whether the evasive maneuvers of the fish are directly expressive of its experience of being caught or whether these maneuvers are mediated by a collateral experience--an internally derived and unpleasant experience that we would label as pain.

I am saying that the sensation of pain is another instance of certain black boxes outputting signals in such a way that they are interpreted and responded to by other black boxes as they would to signals from the outside. All of our inner sensations are examples of our ability to create experiences in our minds. Examples would be our inner voice (thought), inner images (visualizations), emotions, and such things as neurotic symptoms.

What is being indicated here is the view that the conscious-unconscious distinction that is made in psychological discussions really concerns whether or not information is given a sensory status. I am saying that all of these manifestations are to be regarded as information being raised to the sensory level for a reason--one or more reasons that are typically motivational in nature.