“Your dreams can be recorded.” If someone tells this then he will be considered a fool. How can dreams be recorded? Dreams are the activities which occur in our brain when we are into a phase of intense sleep. As predicted by the doctors, these activities are some event which somehow stays in our sub-conscious mind and get reflected as dreams when we are at sleep. We ourselves cannot remember our dreams when we wake up from sleep. Then how can somebody record them?
But with the help of advance technology and various innovative inventions, scientists of present era have made this unbelievable fact possible. They can now record your dreams by measuring your brain activity with the help of an MRI machine, few computers and using thousands of images from the internet. Though the experiment conducted to record dreams attain 60% accuracy, yet this kind of discovery created a milestone in the world of science and technology. In other words it can be said that the scientists have been successful in constructing a dream-reading machine.
The work of the dream-reading machine is to simply record the neurological patterns while you are in sleep. This unbelievable research was performed by researchers from Kyoto and Japan. They have shown their extraordinary ability in this field to device this kind of machine. They conducted the experiment with three participants, whose dream patterns were recorded with almost 60% accuracy.
Idea behind the extraordinary invention:
In 2005, one of the researchers with the help of functional MRI determined the activity of the brain while the subject was awake. Functional MRI includes recording your neurological patter by visualizing the direction of blood flow to different parts of your brain. This was a primitive method and this procedure cannot be conducted to record dreams. To record dreams the subject must at a state of deep sleep.
But following almost the same procedure in a much ambitious and determined way and incorporating more advanced technologies into the entire system, scientists achieved success in this field. Instead of visualizing the direction of blood flow in the brain of the subject, they identified the predictable patterns followed by the brain when exposed to different kind of visual stimuli. The patterns commonly followed by the brain against every visual effect are previously stored in the computer in the form of images. These images are later used to identify the pattern followed by the brain while visualizing the dreams.
Experiment performed for the invention:
REM sleeping phase begins after a few hours of undisturbed sleep. This is the time when the deepest and the longest dreams occur in human. But the best stage for performing this unbelievable experiment is when you are at non-REM phase called the phase-1, which starts few minutes after you go to sleep. This time is considered by the researchers as the best phase to track the visualization occurring in your brain.
The experiment was performed on three subjects with a three-hour sleep, continuously for 10 days. Firstly the EEG (electroencephalography) machine wires were attached to subject. This machine records the various electrical activities occurring inside the brain. Another major function of the EEG machine is to predict the stages of sleep that the subjects are into.
In step 2 the subjects are allowed to sleep inside the fMRI machine. The scientists wait for the subjects to get drifted-off to sleep. Now once their brain reaches phase-1, scientists monitor the flow of blood in different parts of the brain. Then immediately the subjects are woken up and asked to describe what they had seen in their dream. This procedure is carried out for about 200 times for every subject before reviewing the results and leading to a conclusion.
Step 3 involves matching all the data collated from different sources. EEG machine produces the electrical pattern of the brain when exposed to the stimuli. fMRI gives the visual pattern of the brain. Subjects also refer to the common objects they have visualized while dreaming. Now the work of the scientist is to match the three data considering 20 common classes of objects that the participants have seen. This is the most rigorous procedure. In this process the researchers search for the images from the internet which almost matches the common objects visualized by each participant. These images are shown to the subjects immediately they are awake while inside the MRI scanner. The pattern occurring in the brain of the subjects after seeing the images is immediately recorded by the MRI machine. This data is then compared with the data collated from the MRI machine while the subjects were in dream. It contained thousands of images from the web which matched to the 20 common objects.
This complete data package which consisted of all the commonly identified objects and the pattern found in the MRI while the subject in sleep, was fed into a learning algorithm. This algorithm then identifies, improves and refines the provided data. This refined data resulted into a group of images.
Now the subjects are allowed to sleep inside the MRI scanner for another round to record the dream patterns. This time the refined data containing the group of images are shown after waking them up inside the scanner. Immediately another scanning is done which recorded the brain pattern after looking at the objects. Both the data received after scanning were again refined through the learning algorithm. This entire process was repeated several times, considering two common objects each time.
This resulted to a refined data which gave almost 60 percent of accuracy for each subjects. Though the accuracy level is quite an average, yet this discovery became a history in the world of science. To bring greater percentage of accuracy, researchers are completely involved into the experiment and deciding to incorporate more techniques and higher rate of refinement. It is just a beginning to the great invention which will gradually end into a great achievement. That will be the time when our dreams, which are our most personal belongings, can be seen by simply playing the records.