Scientists Learn To Record Our Dreams

Image Credit: Learning Mind

Japanese scientists are reading our brain patterns to identify what we’re seeing while we’re asleep.

Using an MRI machine, a computer algorithm and thousands of images, we’re slowly but surely visualizing and recording the images we see in our heads as we sleep.

The experiment involved letting test subjects go to sleep and waking them up to quiz them about what they saw. Researchers then compared MRI scans to objects that participants reported. There were 200 attempts per individual in the study, and the mechanism was able to successfully predict what people were dreaming about with 60% accuracy.

Despite the potenital negative effects of having your brain consistently scanned inside a machine all night, the study has yielded some promising results. Joseph Stromberg of the Smithsonian writes,

“Our dreams might seem like subjective, private experiences, but they produce objective, consistent pieces of data that can be analyzed by others. This work could be an initial foray into scientific dream analysis, eventually allowing more sophisticated dream interpretation during deeper stages of sleep.”

Science Mag via Smithsonian

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