Recording Dreams

Dreams can feel awfully real when you’re deep in sleep. Perhaps you find a hidden doorway in your home that leads to entirely new rooms and passageways. Maybe you went to work in your underwear — yikes. When you wake up, you check your closet for that mysterious doorway; maybe you jolt awake in a cold sweat, instantly relieved you still have plenty of time to properly clothe yourself before leaving the house. Regardless, whatever you were experiencing felt very real just moments ago. Dreams are essentially vivid memories that never existed. Yet you find yourself inside an all-encompassing parallel reality, a fantastical world that’s uniquely yours. The trouble with dreams, especially the fun ones, is that they’re fleeting. Often, you can’t remember a thing from a dream just moments after waking — the echo of some feeling is all that remains. But what if you could record your dreams, and play them back for analysis, or even share them with friends? Theoretically, experts say, that might one day be possible.

People have been trying to understand dreams since ancient Egyptian times, but the researchers who have carried out this study have found a more direct way to tap into our nighttime visions. The team used MRI scans to monitor three people as they slept. Just as the volunteers started to fall asleep inside the scanners, they were woken up and asked to recount what they had seen. Each image mentioned, from bronze statues to keys and ice picks, was noted, no matter how surreal. This was repeated more than 200 times for each participant. The researchers used the results to build a database, where they grouped together objects into similar visual categories. For example, hotel, house and building were grouped together as 'structures'. The scientists then scanned the volunteers again, but this time, while they were awake and looking at images on a computer screen. With this, they were able to see the specific patterns of brain activity that correlated with the visual imagery. Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani, from the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories, in Kyoto.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/RmnPmz0qnNQ

StARS: System to Augment Restorative Sleep

We spend about one-third of our lives sleeping, but how much to we really understand it? Catch up on Johns Hopkins APL’s research and development efforts to actively elevate restorative sleep for health care and wellness.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/E57oCAb5OHg



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