engleski

The human mind development as a reaction to improvements in memory: possible consequences on sleep, dreams and psychiatric disorders

If sleep came as an adaptation to the maintenance of increased memory capacity, we might speculate that gradual improvements in data retrieval system were the initial change that allowed learning on experience, thus improving reasoning. Visual data collecting is probably the most demanding, but improvements in our memory might have also helped in collecting data from all other senses. It can be speculated that during sleep, in a process similar to formation of hypertext used in web sources, fresh memories are tagged with associative links and archived. In a reversed process, a wake individual facing a challenge retrieves the most relevant memories from the archive using the same association tags. This helps reasoning through adequate allocation of the conscious mind limited resources. In serious survival challenges, too many, or too few retrieved memories are probably of limited value, so evolution pressures optimized the sleep dependent memory maintenance and the memory retrieval system during wake periods. Animals can permanently store important knowledge, but their memory is less readily available and less detailed than the human memory. Human memory is complex, detailed and stressful experiences can be voluntarily or involuntarily revived, even inducing a stress reaction without any external cause. The human mind might have been shaped through a certain trade-off between the learning ability based on selective availability of relevant memories and the potential distortion of reasoning due to distraction by unrelated contents coming from our memory.

memory; sleep; dreams; psychiatric disorders

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