Dream Recording (and Playback) Comes Closer to Reality

(Oct. 28) -- Dream journals are so last century. A sophisticated brain-machine interface might one day give us the chance to record -- and then revisit, rewind and presumably overanalyze -- our nocturnal imaginings.

In a remarkable experiment on a group of epileptics, whose brains had been wired to computers, researchers at the California Institute of Technology used celebrity images to explore patterns and dynamics of focus within the mind.

First, the team established links between the activity of specific neurons and pictures of different celebrities. For example, one neuron might fire in response to Josh Brolin, and another to Justin Timberlake.

Participants were shown two images, side by side (Marilyn Monroe's and Venus Williams' likenesses were also used). They were asked to concentrate on one image, as a computer tracked the firing of their neurons to essentially "read" whether or not the participant was concentrating on the assigned image.

But even when told where to focus, researchers report in the journal Nature, study participants couldn't always make it happen right away.

"Someone sees a picture of Marilyn Monroe and Josh Brolin, and his task is to focus on Brolin. But, somehow, the image of Marilyn Monroe catches his attention more," Dr. Moran Cerf, who led the study, told Wired. "There's competition between two senses, between vision and imagery. The eyes bring one image, his mind's eye brings another, and those fight."

Where do dreams come in? Eventually, as researchers map more neural-image connections -- creating a database of associations based on an individual's brain patterns -- they hope to determine unconscious thoughts based on neural activity.

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The progress could also help "read" the thoughts of comatose patients or those suffering conditions that lead to full paralysis, such as locked-in syndrome.

"There's no clear answer as to why humans dream," Dr. Cerf told the BBC. "And one of the questions we would like to answer is, when do we actually create this dream?"

Of course, the idea of a veritable technological "dream catcher" is decades away. And it would be accompanied by one major downside: Invasive brain implants are still necessary to tap this kind of deep-brain activity.

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