I dreamt scientists could read my mind ...
Source: AFP |
April 6, 2013, Saturday
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SCIENTISTS in Japan say they have found a way to "read" people's dreams, using MRI scanners to unlock some of the secrets of the unconscious mind.
Researchers have managed what they said was "the world's first decoding" of night-time visions, the subject of centuries of speculation that have captivated humanity since ancient times.
In the study, published in the journal Science, researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto used magnetic resonance imaging scans to locate which part of the brain was active during the first moments of sleep.
The scientists then woke up the dreamers and asked them what images they had seen, a process repeated 200 times.
These answers were compared with the brain maps that had been produced by the MRI scanner, the researchers said.
They later built a database based on the results.
On subsequent attempts they were able to predict what images the volunteers had seen with an accuracy rate of 60 percent, rising to more than 70 percent with around 15 specific items including men, words and books.
"We have concluded that we successfully decoded some kinds of dreams with a distinctively high success rate," Yukiyasu Kamitani, a senior researcher at the laboratories and head of the study team, said yesterday.
"Dreams have fascinated people since ancient times, but their function and meaning has remained closed," Kamitani said. "I believe this result was a key step toward reading dreams more precisely."
His team is now trying to predict other dream experiences such as smells, colors and emotion, as well as entire stories in people's dreams.
"We would like to introduce a more accurate method so that we can work on a way of visualizing dreams," he said.
Kamitani, however, admits there is still a long way to go before they are anywhere near understanding a whole dream.
He said the decoding patterns differ for individuals and the database they have developed cannot be applied generally, rather it has to be generated for each person.
The experiment also only used the images the subjects were seeing just before they were woken up. Deep sleep, where subjects have more vivid dreams, remains a mystery.
Researchers have managed what they said was "the world's first decoding" of night-time visions, the subject of centuries of speculation that have captivated humanity since ancient times.
In the study, published in the journal Science, researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto used magnetic resonance imaging scans to locate which part of the brain was active during the first moments of sleep.
The scientists then woke up the dreamers and asked them what images they had seen, a process repeated 200 times.
These answers were compared with the brain maps that had been produced by the MRI scanner, the researchers said.
They later built a database based on the results.
On subsequent attempts they were able to predict what images the volunteers had seen with an accuracy rate of 60 percent, rising to more than 70 percent with around 15 specific items including men, words and books.
"We have concluded that we successfully decoded some kinds of dreams with a distinctively high success rate," Yukiyasu Kamitani, a senior researcher at the laboratories and head of the study team, said yesterday.
"Dreams have fascinated people since ancient times, but their function and meaning has remained closed," Kamitani said. "I believe this result was a key step toward reading dreams more precisely."
His team is now trying to predict other dream experiences such as smells, colors and emotion, as well as entire stories in people's dreams.
"We would like to introduce a more accurate method so that we can work on a way of visualizing dreams," he said.
Kamitani, however, admits there is still a long way to go before they are anywhere near understanding a whole dream.
He said the decoding patterns differ for individuals and the database they have developed cannot be applied generally, rather it has to be generated for each person.
The experiment also only used the images the subjects were seeing just before they were woken up. Deep sleep, where subjects have more vivid dreams, remains a mystery.
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