Why Humans and Robots must Dream

Send us Fan Mail Put a blindfold on a sighted adult and the visual cortex starts being colonised by touch and hearing within forty-five minutes. Not weeks. Not days. Forty-five minutes. This is not a quirk of extreme cases. It is how the cortex works all the time. Every region of the brain is in continuous low-grade negotiation with its neighbours over territory, and the currency of that negotiation is activity. Stop using a subsystem and the neighbours move in, fast. This is the empirical fo...