How to have a lucid dream - Ask yourself, right now, “Am I dreaming?” Do you know how you got where you are? Does what’s around you and what you’re doing make sense? Do letters or numbers look right, or do the figures wriggle around and change while y...

Dreams and memory - Do you remember your dreams? Everyone dreams, but not everyone regularly recalls them. If you wish to explore your dreamscape, you’ll need to remember what dreams may come. You could have the most inspirational, vivid,

Ride the nightmare - If you have nightmares, and you wish to experiment with lucid dreaming, you’re rather lucky. It’s fairly easy to recognize nightmares while they are happening. It often happens to people spontaneously,

A tale of two books, part 2 - One of the things I’ve always had available for experiment is my own mind. Whether it’s mnemonics to improve my memory, or strange mental exercises to induce a lucid dream or an out of body experience,

A tale of two books, part 1 - After over 120 episodes, I thought it might be about time I introduce myself. So, today we have the story of how I fell in love with science. - In this episode, I quote Walt Whitman’s poem “O Me! O Life!

Neural Turing machines - Traditional programming methods are very good at solving problems that have simple rules to apply. They’re not so good when there are no simple rules that can be used, or when the rules are unknown.

Long short-term memory - In episode 117, I expressed some concern. It seemed that neural network implementations lacked a way of holding onto information over time. It turns out that the problem has been addressed by recurrent neural networks.

Robotic dreaming - When you are awake, the world comes in at you through your senses. When you are asleep and dreaming, you create a world from within. An algorithm for deep learning, called “the wake sleep algorithm,” seems to capture this behavior.

Sleep and dreams - There are two types of sleep: rapid eye movement or REM sleep, and non-rapid eye movement, or non-REM. Dreams happen during both types of sleep, and there is a well-established link between the amount and quality of sleep you get,

Sleep, reset and brain wash - While you are sleeping, your brain performs a reset of sorts. Synaptic weights that increased over the course of the day decrease while you are sleeping. At the same time, the fluid your brain floats in,