Is it possible to record our dreams?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

We know what is beyond our planet, solar system and galaxy. But what happens when we dream remains a mystery to scientists. For the first time, scientists from the University of Chicago managed to record the brain activity of a sleeping person in 1952. It was then, in the course of observing the electrical brain activity of sleeping subjects, that the rapid eye movement (REM) phase was discovered, during which we see dreams.

At first, the researchers thought that the data obtained was a breakdown of equipment, since it shows that in the middle of the night a person begins to roll his eyes rapidly. Not finding any malfunctions in the equipment, the scientists entered the room, shone a flashlight on the sleeping man's eyes and saw that the eyes really moved back and forth under the eyelids, while the body lay motionless. Thanks to this discovery, we know today that there are several stages of sleep.

It is noteworthy that when subjects were awakened in the middle of REM sleep, most often they remembered what they were dreaming. But can dreams be recorded?

How does the brain create dreams?

A key figure in sleep science, William Dement, a professor at Stanford University, made a breakthrough discovery in 1957: during REM sleep, the human brain is as active as it is during wakefulness. Moreover, he works in a special mode. Dement theorized that the human brain functions differently according to three periods: sleep, wakefulness, and rapid eye movement.

The next important event in the study of dreams, as "Theory and Practice" writes, was the "feline" experiment of the French researcher Michel Jouvet. During the experiment, the scientist inflicted small damage on the animals in the region of the brain stem and found that the mechanisms that block movement during REM sleep can be stopped.

As a result, sleeping cats arched their backs, hissed and pounced on invisible enemies, acting out their dreams. They "were so ferocious that the experimenter even had to jump back," he wrote. As soon as the cat fiercely rushed at the enemy, she suddenly woke up and sleepily looked around, not knowing where she was.

Dreams can seem terribly real when we are fast asleep. On awakening, however, we forget 85% of our dreams.

Soon the dream stage was discovered in all birds and mammals, and therefore the value of human dreams decreased slightly. As soon as scientists had the opportunity to recognize and fix dreams using neural oscillations, dreams ceased to seem like a complex mystical reflection of our subconscious and the interest of researchers in this area diminished somewhat.

This was until Calvin Hall, professor of psychology at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, created a catalog of human dreams, which became known only in the year of his death (1985). It turned out that the scientist collected a description of more than fifty thousand dreams of people of different ages and nationalities.

The conclusion that Hall came to after 30 years of work was diametrically opposite to Freud's ideas: dreams are not at all filled with hidden meaning - on the contrary, they are mostly extremely uncomplicated and predictable. Hall argued that it was enough for him to know who the characters were in order to accurately guess the further development of events in a dream.

In fact, dreams are vivid memories that never happened. In a dream, we find ourselves inside an all-embracing parallel reality, a fantastic world that belongs only to us. But dreams, especially funny ones, are fleeting and this is their main problem.

In April 2017, according to Discover, a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison identified a "posterior cortical hot zone" in the brain that could indicate whether a person was asleep or not. This part of the brain is involved in the perception of reality in a more general sense. The researchers found that when subjects reported dreams - regardless of whether they remembered the dream - there was a decrease in low-frequency activity or slow waves in this hot zone.

Since dreaming is associated with an increase in high-frequency activity in the hot zone, this decrease in slow waves in brain activity can serve as a signal for when dreams are occurring, as if a red recording light were suddenly on. This is very important because knowing when dreams occur can enable scientists to record them more reliably.

In addition to detecting signals from the brain that indicate that a person is asleep, the scientists also found that parts of the brain involved in perception while awake behave the same way during sleep. It turned out that certain types of perception during sleep activate the same areas of the brain as perception during wakefulness.

Can dreams be recorded?

The work, published in the journal Current Biology, inspires optimism about the possibility of recording dreams, or at least parts of it. Thus, the results obtained showed that the amygdala, an area of the brain that is closely associated with emotions, as well as Wernicke's area responsible for speech processing, were active during REM sleep. The study authors note that recording dreams may be easier than trying to decipher complex visual scenes in real time (observing sleeping subjects).

But what about sound? Will dream recordings be silent in the future or will it look like a movie? Many dream scientists agree that it is easiest to decipher and record visual images.

But there is one problem: the brain works differently during sleep. Areas that are active during waking hours may not be as active during sleep. Because of this, there is a gap between the MRI data collected during wakefulness and sleep, making it difficult to connect the two datasets with computer algorithms.

Sleep researchers today are optimistic about the future, especially in the nascent field of using artificial intelligence algorithms to explore the realm of the unconscious. Existing research today focuses on deciphering visions and movements in dreams, although scientists see no fundamental difficulty in deciphering other modalities and emotions.

The authors of another study say they have deciphered the categorical content of dreams. Kamitani, like other dream scientists, informed his research by waking subjects up throughout the night and asking them what they dreamed about. Then he built individual catalogs of brain activity corresponding to the images perceived during wakefulness and trained the neural network to recognize these patterns of brain waves during different phases of sleep.

By documenting keywords and common categories from subjects' sleep reports, the scientists selected photographs representing each category and showed them to participants when they were awake. The subjects' brain activity when viewing these images while awake was recorded and compared with the brain activity during dreams.

Using this method, the researchers were able to predict the subject's dream content with high accuracy, and they are currently working to create images of brain activity during sleep.

Some scholars believe that dreams are simulations of reality that allow us to learn new behaviors and skills to counter threats or cope with difficult social situations in a very safe environment.

One way or another, most of our inferences about dreams and the role they play in our lives will be subjective, and the study of individual elements of dreams leads to cascades of new questions, answers to many of which do not exist today. But that doesn't mean you have to stop asking questions.

For example, will the ability to record dreams change how and how we think about them? For answers to these and other answers, see a fascinating video from AsapSCIENCE translated and voiced by Vert Dider: