Your body needs sleep to rest. But your brain isn’t resting when you are. It’s doing many things as you slumber, including sorting through recent experiences. This boosts your ability to learn and remember. It now turns out the same strategy can help computer brains.
Pavel Sanda is a computer scientist at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. He was part of a research team that used a computer model to explore how sleep helps a brain learn. “Something very important is going on [during sleep],” he says. The team worked with a computer system that models the brain, also known as artificial intelligence, or AI.
AI models are everywhere. They recommend videos to you on social media. They can recognize your face in photos. They can even drive cars. The vast majority of these models work using what’s known as artificial neural networks, or ANNs. These are a popular form of machine learning.
ANNs were originally inspired by the networks of neurons in a living brain. But in practice, the most common ANNs are nothing like a brain. “Under the hood, they are essentially just linear algebra and math techniques,” says J. Erik Delanois. He is a graduate student in computer science at the University of California San Diego. He worked with Sanda on the new research.
Most ANNs can learn to perform one task just fine. But when it comes to learning a new task, they have a problem that brains don’t. They either fail to learn the new task, or they learn the new thing but erase most of what they knew about their original task. AI developers refer to this as “catastrophic forgetting,” explains Sanda.
But this problem doesn’t tend to affect the human brain. Sanda wondered, “How do [our] new memories get into the pool of old memories without erasing them?”
As our brains sort through new experiences during sleep, he knew, they replay those events many times. He decided to mimic this aspect of human sleep in an AI model. And…
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