Jumping spiders are the only spiders that have moving eyes. Perhaps other spider species also have dreams but we couldn't observe evidence of REM-like sleep because they can't move their eyes!
Do we really need super sophisticated scans when we can just observer their movements during sleep? I am no spider expert, of course. And yet I would expect a dreaming earthly creature to some sort of convulsions.
> Hot take: this sort of research may not justify public funding.
Why not? Seems like an interesting route for maybe getting the first grip on "REM sleep"[1] since "visual input can be controlled in jumping spiders early on (unlike in humans)" and the spider nervous system is simpler (also people don't object _quite_ as much to people sticking probes in spider baby brains as much as human baby brains), any connections between visual stimulus and "REM sleep" can be investigated which -may- lead to advances in understanding our own sleep.
We need to explore profitable areas at depth and everything else at breadth. Knowledge state space is vast. We have no idea where discoveries may find themselves useful.
Animal cognition models may inspire developments in ML. Or they may help us better understand our own brains.
It also makes sense that we may want some small subset of the population to be skilled at the intersection of entomology and these other disciplines.
The people studying fecal transplants hit it big, for instance.
I kind of agree with you, with a different conclusion.
I actually think must academic research shouldn't really be pubically funded.
Instead academia should be much smaller, the state issues a UBI, and people who want to study Spider Dreams can just go off and do that and (optionally) publish online
I think that's a fair perspective, though I also think it's hard to know what has value and we need to invest in high risk high reward projects in addition to those pushing for incremental progress. When I think about designing a nation's scientific portfolio, It's not obvious to me what we pare back on without the benefit of hindsight.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32396061