Accelerated Skill Learning via Dream Engineering and Biofeedback

Konkoly et al. had participants play harmonicas by inhaling through their noses, with said instruments on their nostrils. Then everyone competitively blew bubbles.Each of the two tasks were paired with a sound, and participants rehearsed mentally re-entering the task when the respective sound played.During REM sleep, the researchers replayed one task’s sound cue. The sound biased which dream occurred.So we can influence the content of dreams just by stimulating whatever happened while awake. Even for non-dreaming sleep, we can engineer which memories are consolidated and thereby improve memory.This is all rather crude though. It's one or a few memories we're reactivating indirectly through external stimulation. Direct neural stimulation can have on the order of a hundred thousand times as many degrees of freedom; how far can we improve dream engineering?During waking activity, mammalian brains convert neuron activity into engrams, hippocampal neurons which store individual memories. Engrams encode very narrow, precise memories, like rough snapshots of sensations and thoughts.If you go to coffee with a friend, you'll probably have an engram binding together the fuzzy feelings of her presence, condensation on the cafe windows, texture of the table's wood grain, coffee taste, whatever you two discussed, etc.Then, goes the theory, engram replay progressively generalizes the content of memories into less precise but more applicable representations.Lots of the detail has dropped, but now your friend's face is vaguely associated with joy and calm, clear, cool mornings.Through this process, episodic memory is converted into useful skills/intuition, of the same sort we care about for making superintelligent humans. Accelerating and curating this process could plausibly dilate a bottleneck.(I'm not all that sure this is a core bottleneck, but it seems possible. Like, there's almost certainly an effect on my model, but it may be small. I do expect on median that it's closer to