In the past the only way to interpret dreams was to seek the help of a psychologist or buy a dream interpretation book. According to Wired published today, scientists report for the first time that they’ve successfully decoded details of people’s dreams using brain scans.” It is important to note that the scientist had volunteered subjects and decoded the dreams after the fact. They were not decoded while the subject was actually dreaming.
The research is still impressive and an advancement in science. Wired goes on to say, “This work is yet another impressive step for researchers interested in decoding mental states from brain activity, and it opens the door to a new way of studying dreaming, one of the most mysterious and fascinating aspects of the human experience.”
“Neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani and colleagues at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan monitored three young men as they tried to get some sleep inside an fMRI scanner while the machine monitored their brain activity. The researchers also monitored each volunteer’s brain activity with EEG electrodes, and when they saw an EEG signature indicative of dreaming, they woke him up to ask what he’d been dreaming about. Technically speaking, this is what researchers call “hypnagogic imagery,” which is the dream-like state that occurs as people fall asleep.”
“The research team developed an image decoder for the experiment “based on machine learning algorithms. They trained the decoder to classify patterns of brain activity recorded from the same three men while they were awake and watching a video montage of hundreds of images selected from several online databases.” That way they could differentiate the brain signals and patterns.
The work is very primitive the researchers admit; but, it brings us a step closer to finding what we are actually dreaming and what we understand or remember of the dream when we wake up.
Where it all started
“Human beings have been trying to figure out the meaning of their dreams probably for as long as humankind has existed. The need to make sense of our lives is as human as dreaming is, and dreaming represents an important part of our lives — we do it every single night! Some of the earliest recorded attempts to interpret dreams are from Ancient Babylon, Greece, and Egypt. In those ancient societies, dreams were considered a sacred communication with the divine that could deliver omens of the future.
Sigmund Freud, the first of the psychoanalytic group of dream interpreters saw dreams as an outward expression of an unconscious mind. He did so by having his patients tell them their dreams and then he would analyze them. This is the method that has been used for over a century.
Some modern scientists who have tackled the subject of dream interpretation argue that dreams exist to aid our survival. These researchers theorize that dreams act as a “threat rehearsal” wherein we can confront primal threats, such as threats to our life or status, so that we can better confront these challenges in real life.
Other well-known theories include the biological aspects of dreams. Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while others believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. Ernest Hoffman, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston, Mass., suggests that "...a possible (though certainly not proven) function of a dream to be weaving new material into the memory system in a way that both reduces emotional arousal and is adaptive in helping us cope with further trauma or stressful events."
With the advancement of new and more refined dream decoders, dream interpretation may one day shift from human psychological interpretations to science developed decoding machines. Or, maybe the best interpretation will be a combination of both these methods. Only time will tell.
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