benjamin on Nostr: tl;dr: Schizophrenia might not just be a disorder of waking reality—it could be ...

tl;dr: Schizophrenia might not just be a disorder of waking reality—it could be rooted in a dysfunction of dreaming.

Dream enhancement may become the penicillin of psychiatry: cheap, scalable, and profoundly transformative.

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Could schizophrenia be fundamentally a dream deficiency?

Dreaming is more than random noise—it combats cognitive 'overfitting' by injecting nightly stochastic disruptions into our neural networks, enhancing generalization.

But what if this mechanism fails?

Erik Hoel’s Overfitted Brain Hypothesis proposes dreams evolved to combat 'overfitting'—a common neural network issue where systems learn patterns too well, becoming incapable of generalizing.

No dreams, no generalization.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666389921000647

Imagine training an AI on pictures of dogs, but you only show it Labrador Retrievers. Later, it mislabels a deer as a dog because it overly learned narrow features (brown fur, four legs). The brain can similarly over-learn daily experiences.

Now, apply this to human cognition. Without dreams—our brain's way of adding noise and randomness—our neural patterns become rigid. We risk misclassifying new experiences, creating distorted realities.

Hoel argues dreaming provides nightly exposure to corrupted, hallucinated, and sparse sensory inputs.

These unusual, story-like disruptions recalibrate our brain's models, promoting adaptability & generalization.

Dreams therefore act as natural neural regularizers.
Schizophrenia often involves hallucinations, disrupted narratives, and a blurred line between perception and imagination.

Schizophrenia could be what happens when this regularizing dream mechanism fails.

Without adequate dreaming, neural networks may dangerously overfit waking experiences, distorting reality models.

This would result in increased hallucinations during wakefulness, as the brain attempts spontaneous self-regularization.

Studies already link reduced or disrupted REM sleep (the primary dreaming state) with increased risk and symptom severity in schizophrenia. This aligns with Erik Hoel's OBH.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8446088/

Dreams seem to buffer our mental models from becoming too narrow or too certain. When dreams fail, mental flexibility suffers, possibly manifesting as psychosis or delusion—hallmarks of schizophrenia.

Michael Johnson's Symmetry Theory of Valence suggests mental health thrives on balanced neural patterns. Dreams might help maintain this cognitive-emotional symmetry. Without dreams, asymmetry emerges, possibly manifesting as schizophrenia’s emotional dysregulation.


https://opentheory.net/2021/07/a-primer-on-the-symmetry-theory-of-valence/

Johnson's Vasocomputation theory highlights vascular states as cognitive 'latches.' Dreams may regulate these tensions nightly w/ dream deprivation leading to chronically clenched cognitive states—fueling schizophrenia’s hallucinatory episodes.

A testable idea is that dream-deprived individuals should display heightened cognitive rigidity and elevated hallucination potential when awake, which is already mostly known to be the case.

Known schizophrenics may have dream disorders.
With tech like portable EEG and dream journaling apps, assessing dream frequency, vividness, and content in individuals with schizophrenia vs. controls would be pretty feasible.

I record dreams nightly in Obsidian.

If true, enhancing dream activity (via REM-inducing pharmaceuticals or neurostimulation techniques) could offer novel therapeutic pathways.

We might treat schizophrenia by amplifying dream function, promoting neural generalization.