by dkeviv

Created on: March 05, 2010

Everybody gets dreams and most of them are incoherent. Some of them don't make any sense but some are more like recalled memories. We have all wondered why we get dreams and there are people trying to predict future from a person's dreams. Does dreams really have any meaning? Following is a plausible theory on why we get dreams based on how our memory cells function.

A capacitor stored with a lot of charge leaks more than a capacitor with a lesser charge. In a capacitor the rate of discharge is directly proportional to the initial Voltage which in turn is dependent on how much the capacitor is charged to. Our memory cells are more like a capacitor and so to say not a perfect one. It also needs recharging to remember. If you don’t think of something for a long time you forget that being the total discharge. So basically we have a dynamic memory and not a static one. While you sleep memory cells don’t charge or to say don’t make new memories, instead they just discharge. The memory cells which have more stored charge discharges more. The memories, that one was excited about, discharge at night more. When the discharge is very less one wouldn’t sense it but when the discharge is more, one could sense it as dreams. That explains why you don’t have dreams every night.The incoherency of the things that a person sees in dreams can also be easily explained. As only the memory cells with more charge discharge more, it will be like a collage of data pieces. So the data will be incoherent instead of being a coherent sequence.

This theory also explains why dreaming improves our memory. When a capacitive memory cell discharges during the dreams, not all the charges are dissipated but the excess charge is stored in another memory cell. So it’s like the data is stored in a duplicate cell. This improves your memory, as it is easy to remember, or in geek terms, the fetching time is decreasing as the probability of finding a data increases as the number of duplicate data storage increases. So it also works like backing up your data.

Comparing the memory cells to capacitors is just a rough way of comparison. The neurons that are the basic units of our nervous system conduct the sensory pulses created according to the excitation of the senses but we don’t know how it is stored for later purposes.

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