Have you ever wished you could remember your dreams more vividly? Or have you ever wanted to record your dreams and watch them later like a TV program or a great movie?
I donโt know about you, but this is always something I have wanted to do! And now researchers have found a way to translate our every thought and dream into a video that can be watched later.
This innovative device utilizes existing technologies like Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and supercomputers to make a video of what a person is thinking about through computational models.
The first-ever study in the United States was conducted at Brown University in 2011 and in it, three people were asked to wear an EEG device while they slept. They were then woken up in the height of dream activity and asked what they were dreaming about. The device cataloged all of the brain images and stored them.
The scientists repeated this process 200 hundred times for each person and made a database of all of the images. Once they were awake, the scientists showed them the images and scanned their brains again based on their responses.
The people in the study were then asked to sleep again, and the brain scanners went to work. What happened next was revolutionary, the device was able to predict what the person was dreaming about!
While this was exciting, at this point the scientists reached only broad object recognition, and it wasnโt until researchers at the University of Berkley, took it one step further and were able to get video clips from dreams.
In their study, subjects once again were hooked up to fMRI devices, yet, this time they were shown movie trailers. The computer hooked up to the fMRI scanned the subjectsโ brain images and then looked over 18 million seconds youtube clips and tried to recreate what the person was seeing.
While some images from the brain scanner turned out pretty fuzzy (alike to a dream you are trying to remember when you wake up) some images were captured in complete clarity!
This technology may take some innovation, but this revolutionary science will reach dream recording in full spectrum.
Applications for this tech also include, the ability to see what is going on in the minds of people who canโt communicate (like coma patients and stroke victims), as well as opening up avenues for the formation of a brain-machine interface, that can send and receive messages via the internet from people across the globe.
Sources:
Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind
http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/04/10/researchers-map-brain-activity-to-read-dreams/
