Dreams are an amazing phenomenon - and considering you spend roughly 6 years of your life dreaming,it's quite curious that we often brush them aside to be quickly forgotten.Night after night our brains go to work and bring us some of the most incredible,bizarre and often seemingly random imagery and storylines. But...what are dreams? And like the many science fiction stories or movies,could we ever record and figure out what we're seeing while we're dreaming?
You have heard of people referring to 'brain waves' before,but have you ever stopped to think: are the actual waves,and do they...carry information? Are brain waves similar to,say,radio waves? The answer is,yes;both brain and radio waves are forms of electromagnetic radiation-waves that travel at the speed of light. Every time you think,thousands of neurons fire at the same frequency and generate a wave. These waves oscillate at around 10 to 100 cycles per sound.
Radio waves,on the other hand oscillate at around 50 million to 1 billion times per second. Scientists have long used this phenomenon to measure brain activity and interface the brain to electronic devices. It allows us to see which part of the brain are active for different activities,and similarly which parts of the brain are active during dreaming.Strange as it may seem, we still barely understand why we sleep let alone why we dream. Michael from Vsauce does a fantastic job explaining the main theories for why we dream.But there are so many theories because we can't really measure or know what people are dreaming about,without waking them up and asking them. Of course,this is the subject to forgetting or other errors. Unfortunately, there is no device that exists to allow us to peer into the mind of a dreamer.. or is there?
Crazy as it sounds,scientists have created a technique to do just that. The mind-reading technology begun with a functional MRI Scanner,inside which subjects were shown simple pictures made up of black and white pixels. The software then finds patterns in the brain activity that corresponds to the specific images. For example,if the letter "T" was shown,the software would record exactly how the brain reacted. After sufficient data,the subjects were then shown completely different images,and the software would predict and recreate what it thought the subjects were seeing.
Further studies began to use more complex visuals during subjects sleep. In this case,they first had the subjects fall asleep while in an fMRI, and would wake them up in the middle of dreaming,quickly asking them what they were dreaming about. They then used thousands of images from the internet to get a best approximation of what the subject was seeing based on brain scans.
After doing this nearly 200 times with each person,and plugging the information into the learning algorithm,software was used to predict and generate future dreams.Though by no means perfect,it was clear that the machines predictions were better than chance,matching up with the dreamers description. Perhaps even more shocking is a study that actually used video footage; after showing subjects 2 hours of movie footage and analyzing their brain activity ,then they used a library of 18 million,1 second YouTube clips to match the brain activities.
Here are the results:On the left are new,unrelated clips that the subjects were later shown,and on the right is what the software guessed they were seeing,using a mashed up combination of the YouTube clips as an approximation. All of this based on their brain waves. As these software programs become more and more complex,we come that much closer to accurately visualizing and recording our thoughts and dreams. At which point,perhaps,we"ll have a few more clues into why we dream,in the first place. And if you'd like to find out about other amazing and unanswered scientific phenomenon,Subscribe the channel!
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