Mammals dream about the world they are about to experience before they are born

> Are these innate patterns of activity priming mammalian brains in a similar way?

A newborn foal can stand within 55 minutes of being born and can walk or run within 90 minutes. That is crazy fast training speed. Is it training initialization or is it a form of transfer learning?

Most human babies take 9-18 months to walk, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that human babies have immature brains that cannot mature due to birth canal constraints, which is constrained by pelvis size which is constrained by the need to walk upright.

I have wondered about how true this is. Maybe our brains are just so much more powerful, or capable of much deeper understanding, that we require a much lower initial learning rate.

The lottery ticket could explain why some children learn to walk at 6 months, while others are closer to 24 months, with no different in intelligence or motor skills in later life.

Edit: As some people below have correctly pointed out, human babies could not walk within an hour for physiological reasons, but nor do they exhibit the basic motor skills, spatial reasoning or image processing required for walking. Many human babies even struggle to feed for the first 24-48 hours or longer.

Meanwhile baboon babies can hold onto their mother from birth while the mother climbs trees.

I guess I can see some parallel the way you describe it, but it is not that tight of an analogy IMO. Correct me if I'm wrong but the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis mainly means that, for many of our tasks, we start with needlessly huge networks, and thus a good portion of the learning process is just the network learning to "cope with the noise" from the extraneous connections

Hence why the lottery ticket network (being a smaller version of the same initial network) can achieve similar accuracy (but not 'better') in much shorter time - because you took away all the confounding stuff. That kind of 'counterfactual' doesn't really translate to a biological domain, right?

Also - the baby brain is not really a 'pruned', smaller version of the adult brain, right? Neither is the fetus brain compared to the baby brain (which is more to the point of the article). So the analogy breaks down there too

I guess what the article describes is a bit like "pre-training" a full network with 'synthetic' experiences that quickly tune it for later. In that sense, I think its like these "dreams" are a 'distilled dataset' [1]. The question then is: how is this dataset being passed on from mother/father to child?

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.10959

Abstract:

> Model distillation aims to distill the knowledge of a complex model into a simpler one. In this paper, we consider an alternative formulation called dataset distillation: we keep the model fixed and instead attempt to distill the knowledge from a large training dataset into a small one. The idea is to synthesize a small number of data points that do not need to come from the correct data distribution, but will, when given to the learning algorithm as training data, approximate the model trained on the original data. For example, we show that it is possible to compress 60,000 MNIST training images into just 10 synthetic distilled images (one per class) and achieve close to original performance with only a few gradient descent steps, given a fixed network initialization. We evaluate our method in various initialization settings and with different learning objectives. Experiments on multiple datasets show the advantage of our approach compared to alternative methods.

How hard would it be to find random networks that don't need to be trained at all?

It’s not just mammals. I’ve always been astounded that spiders know how to spin webs. Their mothers don’t teach them how!

I recall once hearing a talk that discussed, what I recall as, "test patterns" being run across the visual cortex prior to birth. Essentially, waves / patterns of stimulation would go across the optic structure that would be used to, again as I recall it, "calibrate" the visual system.

I dug a bit and was able to find this paper https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15289028/ , which seems to track my memory. It has a number of forward and backward citations if you are interested. Perhaps someone with far more than my vague recollection of a talk will step in though!

sorry but I don't think there is any sense in which the infant brain is a blank slate. Definitely not for vital functions (as seen by the "instinctual" abilities noted elsewhere in this thread, not in language/cognition, and IMO not even culturally/morally.

I don't think brains are pre-wired to recognize 3D objects.

There was an example case of a blind man with cataracts getting it fixed at around 50 years old. People were curious if he would be able to know if a sphere was round just by looking at it without touching it.

IIRC - not only could he not do that, but he couldn't visually interpret shadows (saw them as black splotches - didn't recognize depth), and was confused why objects got smaller as they were moving away.

I think the human visual system trains on a lot of visual input data, but it typically happens at the baby stage where you can't really interact.