Researchers in Japan can predict certain features of dreams by looking at the brain activity of sleeping volunteers.
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By Mo Costandi of Nature magazine
Scientists have learned how to discover what you are dreaming about while you sleep.
A team of researchers led by Yukiyasu Kamitani of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, used functional neuroimaging to scan the brains of three people as they slept, simultaneously recording their brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG).
The researchers woke the participants whenever they detected the pattern of brain waves associated with sleep onset, asked them what they had just dreamed about, and then asked them to go back to sleep.
This was done in three-hour blocks, and repeated between seven and ten times, on different days, for each participant. During each block, participants were woken up ten times per hour. Each volunteer reported having visual dreams six or seven times every hour, giving the researchers a total of around 200 dream reports.
Perchance to dream
Most of the dreams reflected everyday experiences, but some contained unusual content, such as talking to a famous actor. The researchers extracted key words from the participants’ verbal reports, and picked 20 categories — such as 'car', 'male', 'female', and 'computer' — that appeared most frequently in their dream reports.
Kamitani and his colleagues then selected photos representing each category, scanned the participants’ brains again while they viewed the images, and compared brain activity patterns with those recorded just before the participants were woken up.
The researchers analyzed activity in brain areas V1, V2 and V3, which are involved in the earliest stages of visual processing and encode basic features of visual scenes, such as contrast and the orientation of edges. They also looked at several other regions that are involved in higher order visual functions, such as object recognition.
In 2008, Kamitani and his colleagues reported that they could decode brain activity associated with the earliest stages of visual processing to reconstruct images shown to participants. Now, they have found that activity in the higher order brain regions could accurately predict the content of the participants’ dreams.
“We built a model to predict whether each category of content was present in the dreams,” says Kamitani. “By analyzing the brain activity during the nine seconds before we woke the subjects, we could predict whether a man is in the dream or not, for instance, with an accuracy of 75–80%.”
The findings, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, Louisiana, earlier this week, suggest that dreaming and visual perception share similar neural representations in the higher order visual areas of the brain.
“This is an interesting and exciting piece of work,” says neuroscientist Jack Gallant at the University of California, Berkeley, of the work presented at the meeting. “It suggests that dreaming involves some of the same higher level visual brain areas that are involved in visual imagery.”
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8 Comments
Add Comment"Car, male, female, computer..." Those are some prosaic dreams!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about flaming buildings that melt into giant witch's heads from which sprout vines whose flowers turn into eyeballs that follow me everywhere and recite "recipes for flying" in my grandmother's voice?
That's what my dreams are like.
I'm with you on that one, Randoo. And no sex? That's weak.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"but some contained unusual content, such as talking to a famous actor." How incredibly bizarre! And I thought the dream about my cat scolding me for not fully grasping Bayesian statistics was on the unusual side.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting study though.
I once lucid-dreamed through the entire Captain America movie, up until the point where Cap has to jump onto the Red Skull's jet (I chickened out over the Alps, and woke up wetting the bed and twisted up like a pretzel (from doing action moves while out cold). Embarrasing but true). Compared to getting to pull off superhero moves and saying all of the cool lines, talking to famous actors is mind-crushingly dull.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe headline typically overstates the case. Just another example of SciAm sounding like grocery store gossip tabloids. "Scientists Read Dreams" Really?! Did SciAm editors learn to write these headlines during their vast experience on the National Inquirer or the US Weekly? What ever happened to SciAm professionalism and accuracy?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(Apologies to readers, but this one deserves every bit of sarcasm. I wish that I could say it isn't typical output from the online editors lately.)
"scan the brains of three people as they slept" - wow, what a dataset. They used 3 people and inferred 20 categories from the dreams of those 3 people. Really? And they think this is newsworthy?? Ugh.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScientists read dreams article is fantastic. Reading dream is reading mind is a great achievement. Good luck.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisS. N. Tiwary
Director
Dreams happen during REM and usually just before you wake up after hours long sleep.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have MS and used to periodically have dreams(nightmares) where I was involved in car collision and I couldn't move a muscle. In the dream I wanted to wake up but couldn't. My wife would tell me I groaning and grunting and not making any intelligible speech. She would tap me on the shoulder, or while napping on my own, I eventually snapped out of the dream.
A couple months later I realized my brain was trying to tell me something. I eventually figured out that I had to accept that due to my MS I may (unlikely) become so disabled that would not be able to move at all. Like what happened to my aunt who died from a rare form of MS in 1980 at age 40.
Once I thought carefully about it and accepted, really accepted, this possibility I no longer had these types of dreams.