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Dreams come true Japanese researchers have successfully developed a device that will be able to literally playback your dreams in a video sequence.

Analysis:

The message states that Japanese scientists have developed a device that can playback your dreams in a video sequence. Yes, the claim is a fact, but does not give complete information. Also, prior to this development in 2013, scientists at UC Berkeley University developed a system to decode and reconstruct the dynamic visual experiences of people.

In 2011

In 2011, researchers at University of California, Berkeley developed a system that captures the visual activity in human brains and reconstructs it as digital video clips. The system actually decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models. At that time, however, the technology could only reconstruct the movie clips that people have already viewed.

The Research

The brain activity of subjects viewing a set of clips were first recorded using brain scans and fed into a computer program that learned how to associate the visual patterns in the movie clips with corresponding brain activity. Then the brain activity generated by a second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was accomplished by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program, to predict the brain activity each movie clip would most likely generate in each test subject. In the video shown below, a professor from Berkeley demonstrates and explains the interesting development.

The resulting quality, however, is not good. Nonetheless, researchers believed the potential to analyze human dreams and memories are enormous. They also mentioned that it could be helpful to understand the thinking process of people who cannot communicate verbally, like coma patients, stroke victims and others with neurodegenerative diseases.

In 2013

In 2013, researchers from Japan’s Kyoto said that they have built a ‘dream-reading machine’, which predicted with 60 percent accuracy the sleep time visualizations and neurological patterns of three test subjects. This was a new study, where a team of scientists used an MRI machine, a computer model and thousands of images from the internet to figure out what people see when they dream. The study, published in Science Journal ScienceMag.org, is believed to be the first case where objective data has been culled about the contents of a dream.

The Research

The research done on three subjects recorded their brain activity while sleeping using MRI scanner and electroencephalography (EEG) machine over a period of 10 days. Then they recorded the 20 most common classes of objects seen by each participant and searched for the images on the Web that roughly matched them. They showed these images and those in the MRI scanner to the test subjects and compared if the people had seen the same things in their dreams. Further again, they fed all this data along with the participants’ brain activity — into a learning algorithm that is capable of improving and refining its model based on the data.

Again, the research is still in the basic stage. The reconstruction algorithm got the brain activity right 60 percent of the time, a proportion the researchers say cannot be explained by chance. However, as the algorithm learns and improves itself, the research findings could eventually revolutionize the field of scientific dream analysis, as to how dreams are interpreted and understood. These developments will also be helpful in medical aspect.