Scientists May Have the Ability to Peek Into Your Dreams

Helen Holmes April 05, 2013

By recording the neural activities in the brain, researchers were able to peek into the visual experiences of three people as they sleep.

In a research published in the journal Science, scientists at Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional MRI to monitor the brain activities of the participants, as well as polysomnography to record the physical changes that take place while they sleep. The data obtained were then compared to the brain activities that occur while the participants are awake and looking at real images. According to the lead author Yukiyasu Kamitani, their study shows that it may be possible to use brain activity patterns to see and understand what a person is dreaming about. It is also possible to create a dream decoder that works for different people using a small amount of data for calibration, he added.

While the research shows images that are way beyond reality, the researchers suggest that there are practical applications of their findings. Kamitani said there is evidence suggesting that the pattern of spontaneous brain activity is relevant to health issues, including psychiatric disorders.

The study only involved three participants, and each of them had more than 7 or 10 sleep ‘experiences’. To make the experiment easier to do, the researchers chose to awaken the participants during light sleep rather than the deep sleep phase known as ‘rapid eye movement’. And since it usually takes about an hour for a person to reach the first REM stage, it may be difficult to accumulate sleep and dream data from a large number of participants, Kamitani explained. But the researchers are still planning to conduct a similar experiment in the future which will then focus on REM as it contained more and richer contents.

As the participants wake up from their dreams, they were asked for a visual report for a minimum of 200 times each. According to the researchers, although their method doesn’t help explain why people dream, it may provide a tool for investigating the function of dreaming.

But why is it most people can’t remember the full details of their dreams? Kamitani believes that it is because certain neurotransmitters in the brain that are involved in memory are not active during sleep. "Since the contents of a verbal report were predicted only from brain activity immediately before awakening—zero to 15 seconds before—[it may be that we] only remember contents related to brain activity [we experience] immediately before we wake up."

Study Limitations

Dr Irwin Feinberg, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis argued that the research was not designed to establish a cause-and-effect relationship. He said the data obtain in the study were largely statistical and purely by association, and does not shed light on the function sleep or the function of dreaming within sleep.

Source of the article:

Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep