Well, now you know! - #4 Can we record our dreams?

If you are anything like me at all, then no doubt you have some crazy dreams which appear to make no sense at all and are full of strange and random occurrences.

I often wake up in the morning dazed and confused, but then soon enough, I forget all of lasts nights dreamy adventures.

Well, if you have ever wanted to replay your dreams to figure out just what the hell was going on, or to perhaps give you a deeper insight into your subconscious thoughts, well.. perhaps one day soon you will be able to!

Scientists in Japan have discovered a way to interpret your dreams through measuring brain activity. The data can be plugged into a computer algorithm that reconstructs your dreams for you to replay on demand.

How does it actually work?

The remarkable breakthrough makes use of a fairly straightforward idea: that when we visualize certain types of objects in our minds, our brains generate consistent neural patterns that can then be correlated with what is being visualised by the dreamer.

Here's how the science works. Subjects were first asked to hook themselves up to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine, then to fall asleep within an fMRI machine. Scientists used the EEG readings to identify when the subjects began to enter the dreaming phase. The subjects were then promptly woken up and asked to recall what they were dreaming about. This process was repeated nearly 200 times for each subject.

Source: Bcchildrens

Scientists then crunched this data and discovered that some common types of objects from the subjects' dreams could be correlated with brain patterns as recorded by the fMRI scans. They then searched the internet to look for images that roughly matched the objects from the subjects' dreams, and entered all of this information into a learning algorithm that refined the model even further. That algorithm was then able to use the data from the dreamers' fMRI scans to assemble videos from the internet images, basically creating a primitive movie for each dream.

However, It is important to note that this research is still in a rudimentary phase and they only claim to get the dream right 60% of the time - still, this is an amazing and interesting idea.

Personally, I think this is an amazing concept which so much potential to help us understand our subconscious minds.

Let me know what you guys think down in the comments :)

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Will