Have you ever had a dream in which you wanted to talk to your friend about what had happened but just couldn’t find the words to explain what you have just witnessed in your subconscious mind? Well recently scientists have discovered a way in order for them to read your dreams by scanning your brain. The purpose for this experiment was to better understand the brain and understand what goes through it as we sleep.

What researchers had done was they did an experiment on three different people where they used MRI scans as they began to drift asleep. As soon as they would fall asleep, right after they would be awoken and asked a series of in depth questions on what it was that they had seen in their dreams. They repeated this process 200 times for each participant! After all of that work, what it had done was it gave the researchers a database of images in which they connected with brain activity and began to group similar visual depictions together.

After they have acquired the database of images, scientists were able to analyze the brain activity as the participants had slept and began assuming on what it was that they were currently dreaming about at the moment. Scientists were able to predict what people were dreaming about. They were 60 percent accurate with their assumptions that were based off of many variables. Professor Kamitani who is one of the researchers says, “We were able to reveal dream content from brain activity during sleep, which was consistent with the subjects’ verbal reports”.

However this is just the beginning of their research. Scientists wish to continuously grow in their experiment. They had only started to analyze dreams of light sleep. They now wish to target deep sleep since those are where the most vivid dreams are thought to occur. They also want to see in depth if the MRI brain scan can help detect colors and smells people come across in their dreams as well.

So stay tuned everyone. Some see this as a fascinating experiment in which dreams are able to become decoded but others see this as their nightmare being played for them on a DVR. So what do you guys think? Is this a neat experiment or are you guys going to dread seeing your most embarrassing dreams or horrifying nightmares being shown to people and played for you?

Source & Image Source
BBC News
BBC Image