Here’s my hypothesis: Similar to illness behavior, it prevents you from hunting when conditions are unfavorable to you. Dreams allow simulations of threatening events instead. Fasting long enough overrides the clock (it does; you can change your circadian rhythm by hours at a time by selectively fasting); eventually the need for energy outweighs the risk of hunting at night.
Idea: a data classification metamodel based on the immune system: train a small bag of classifiers and clone the ones that perform well, but with a small chance of random mutations to the hyperparameters. Weight classifiers created in this manner exponentially based on iterations since last correct classification. Keep a “memory threshold” below which the weight will not fall in case that pattern is encountered again.
The concept of original antigenic sin is something that can be simulated using data clustering.
Neat idea on the way home: wouldn’t it be nifty to “catch” pathogens as they infect the body by advertising “I am a cell ready for infection” (bet there are marker proteins for that), then perform the bait and switch on them as they make their move, walling them away and exposing them to the immune system as a form of proactive, adaptive, and needle-less vaccine?
It’s important to observe commonalities in presentation, symptoms, causes, or treatment responses of various diseases, as these may suggest a common etiology. For instance, trigeminal neuralgia and cluster headaches both present with extreme pain, short frequent attacks separated by periods of remission, and autonomic symptoms (such as lacrimation and Horner’s syndrome). These diseases should be compared and effective treatments for one studied on the other.
The most severe autoimmune diseases seem to result from an inappropriate immunological memory response against self tissue. Is there some way to make the immune system forget? Selective, specific immunomodulation seems like it could be promising for a very wide range of diseases, cancer, MS, and SLE among them.
I think I just found the branch of medicine I want to study.
Partition two areas. Allow cats to sleep in either, but wake the cats who sleep in one of the areas midway through sleep. Also partition the cats into two groups: a group that is woken during REM sleep and a group that is woken during non-REM sleep.
As time passes, observe avoidance behaviors. If the cats woken during REM sleep more readily avoid the area in which they are awoken, then it is likely that not only are the cats dreaming, but that these dreams serve a training function.
One of the most intriguing connections between biology and machine learning is in the learning ability of the adaptive immune system. If you abstract away the biology, it appears to be a very complex problem of classification: is something an invader or not? False positives cause autoimmune diseases. False negatives cause dangerous infections.
Just as in machine learning, we can use the concepts of sensitivity and specificity, positive and negative predictive values, classification, clustering, and feature extraction.
And we can also use the techniques to guide treatments.
How about using AdaBoost to train the immune system? Expose it only to the examples it initially misclassifies? There are so many places where these two fields can intersect…
Humans are classified in the family Hominidae, along with the other Great Apes. Wikipedia has a history of the revision of the taxonomy of this particular family, and it’s an interesting modern example of the conflict between the human desire to set ourselves apart as special creatures and scientific objectivity dictating that we are not all that special from a biological standpoint. In particular, note the creation of tribe hominini after humans were merged into the same subfamily as chimpanzees and gorillas and the eventual reluctant merging of chimps into hominini as well.
I am wondering whether there are certain associations between the properties of the skin and, say, the presence of a noncutaneous infection in the bloodstream (or even a change in the normal levels of various hormones and other things that we currently need to take blood to test). At the least, one would expect quantifiable changes in the skin as a result of, say, leukocytosis, which can be used as a highly noninvasive biomarker for infection. It’s a potential area to explore using data mining.