About a year ago, we published about the first hacking of a human brain.
Hacking the human brain has become a reality
Immediately afterwards, a new achievement in the human brain came to us from Japanese scientists who, for the first time, managed to see the dreams of third parties.
Japanese researchers begin to see the content of dreams
Today's news comes to us from Washington with the following article published by Vima, which reports on the progress that has been made with the new electronic dreamcatchers.
With 60% accuracy
The researchers, led by Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, who published the relevant work in the journal "Science", according to the BBC, used the imaging technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in combination with special computer software, and managed to "read" with an accuracy rate of 60% the dream images that the volunteers of the experiment saw while they were sleeping.
The "father" of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, have placed great importance on dreams, but why people dream remains a mystery to science. "We know almost nothing about how dreams work," admitted neuroscientist Masako Tamaki.
"But I had a strong belief that decoding dreams would be possible, at least for some aspects of them. I was not surprised by the results, but I was excited," said Kamitani.
The experiment
Japanese researchers worked with three volunteers who were sleeping and dreaming in a laboratory setting. Once the volunteers appeared to be dreaming (before the first stage of REM sleep), the scientists woke them up and asked them to describe what they had seen in their dream. This was repeated over 200 times with each of the three participants in the experiment.
The slightest dream image, no matter how unreal, was recorded by the researchers who then asked the volunteers, this time while they were awake, to see the same images on a computer screen. In this way, the scientists were able to associate each image with a neural “print” in the volunteers’ brains. In this way, they created a large database of digital-neural data, in which similar images were grouped into the same category (e.g., dreams of houses, hotels, and any other building were classified as “buildings”).
The neural patterns of dreams
In the next stage, the volunteers fell back to sleep, only now the images their brains created during the dream (i.e. the alternating neural patterns) could be correlated by the computer software with specific images already contained in the database. Because the same areas of the brain are activated when someone sees the same image, whether they are awake or dreaming, the end result was that the scientists could "guess" to a significant extent what the volunteers were dreaming about, even before they woke up and described their dream.
The Japanese researchers intend to deepen their research in the field of deep sleep, which occurs in the middle of the night, when people usually have their most vivid dreams (REM stage). In addition, they want to further their research to determine whether and to what extent it is possible, through the recording, imaging and analysis of brain activity, to predict other aspects of dreams, beyond the images, such as the emotions, smells, colors, etc. that someone experiences when dreaming.
Machines will never be able to fully read everyone's dreams
Cognitive neuroscientist Dr Mark Stokes of the University of Oxford called the research “exciting”and brought us closer to the era of machines reading human dreams. But he said it was still years away. “There is no reason in principle why it couldn’t happen. The difficulty lies in systematically correlating brain activity with dream phenomena,” he said.
He warned, however, that it would be almost impossible in the future for the same mechanical dream decoding system to be able to "read" everyone's dreams: "We could never really make a machine that would read everyone's dreams. Dreams have an idiosyncratic character for everyone, therefore (dream) brain activity will never be uniform for everyone."
