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The present clamour that British academics should do more to help British industry is understandable but, so far, also unreflective. Everybody's interest would be helped by explicit guidelines.
We propose that the function of dream sleep (more properly rapid-eye movement or REM sleep) is to remove certain undesirable modes of interaction in networks of cells in the cerebral cortex. We postulate that this is done in REM sleep by a reverse learning mechanism (see also p. 158), so that the trace in the brain of the unconscious dream is weakened, rather than strengthened, by the dream.
Recent interest in the theory of chaos has been prompted largely by the wish to understand the inexplicable. But there may be serious practical consequences for engineers.
