Pretty soon not even your dreams may be private anymore. Japanese
scientists have learned how to interpret what you're dreaming about by
measuring your brain activity while you sleep. This data can then be
plugged into an algorithm that reconstructs your dream so that it can be
played back for you when you're awake
In other words, scientists have invented a sort of dream-reading
machine. Before long, you may never have to worry about forgetting what
you dreamed about ever again. You'll be able to simply play your dreams
back after you wake up in the morning.
The remarkable breakthrough makes use of a fairly straightforward
idea: that when we visualize certain types of objects in our minds, our
brains generate consistent neural patterns that can then be correlated
with what is being visualized. For instance, when you imagine a chair,
your brain fires in a pattern that occurs whenever a chair is
visualized. An algorithm can then be used to tie the data from a brain
scan to the appropriate correlated images. And voilà ! Your dream can be
reconstructed.
So far the research is still fairly rudimentary-- researchers only
claim to get the dream right about 60 percent of the time-- but it's
still an extraordinary turn for the science of the mind.
Here's how the study worked. Subjects were first asked to hook
themselves up to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine, then to fall
asleep within an fMRI machine. Scientists used the EEG readings to
identify when the subjects began to enter a dreaming phase. The subjects
were then promptly woken up and asked to recall what they were dreaming
about. This process was repeated nearly 200 times for each subject.
Later, the scientists crunched this data and discovered that
certain common types of objects from the subjects' dreams could be
correlated with brain patterns as recorded by the fMRI scans. They then
used an internet search engine to look for images that roughly matched
the objects from the subjects' dreams, and entered all of this
information into a learning algorithm that refined the model even
further. That algorithm was then able to use the data from the dreamers'
fMRI scans to assemble videos from the internet images, basically
creating a primitive movie for each dream.
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