Photographing a Human Dream

One new line of research is to try to reconstruct the precise image that the brain is thinking of, so that one might be able to create a video of a person’s thoughts. In this way, one might be able to make a video recording of a dream.

Since time immemorial, people have been fascinated by dreams, those ephemeral images that are sometimes so frustrating to recall or understand. Hollywood has long envisioned machines that might one day send dreamlike thoughts into the brain or even record them, as in movies like Total Recall. All this, however, was sheer speculation. 

Until recently, that is. Scientists have made remarkable progress in an area once thought to be impossible: taking a snapshot of our memories and possibly our dreams. The first steps in this direction were taken by scientists at the Advanced Telecommunications Research (ATR) Computational Neuroscience Laboratory in Kyoto. They showed their subjects a pinpoint of light at a particular location. Then they used an fMRI scan to record where the brain stored this information. They moved the pinpoint of light and recorded where the brain stored this new image. Eventually, they had a one-to-one map of where scores of pinpoints of light were stored in the brain. These pinpoints were located on a 10 × 10 grid.

Then the scientists flashed a picture of a simple object made from these 10 × 10 points, such as a horseshoe. By computer they could then analyze how the brain stored this picture. Sure enough, the pattern stored by the brain was the sum of the images that made up the horseshoe.

In this way, these scientists could create a picture of what the brain is seeing. Any pattern of lights on this 10 × 10 grid can be decoded by a computer looking at the fMRI brain scans.

In the future, these scientists want to increase the number of pixels in their 10 × 10 grid. Moreover, they claim that this process is universal, that is, any visual thought or even dream should be able to be detected by the fMRI scan. If true, it might mean that we will be able to record, for the first time in history, the images we are dreaming about. Of course, our mental images, and especially our dreams, are never crystal sharp, and there will always be a certain fuzziness, but the very fact that we can look deeply into the visual thoughts of someone’s brain is remarkable.

By Winston Pi

Resource:
http://annawrites.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/naked-lost1.jpg
http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2014/03/physicist_michio_kaku_talks_te.php