Scientists read dreams with brain scans By reading brainwaves and observing the visual processing regions of sleeping brains, Japanese researchers were able to interpret a select bunch of dream images simply from neural activity. By comparing how certain regions of an awake brain fired in response to images in photos, and then comparing these to dream journals and brain activity, they were able to reconstruct exactly when the brains had the dream experience. It’s not exactly television of the mind, but pretty cool nonetheless. Unfortunately, Pluto was not involved in this research, although his dreams are pretty easy to read. (more at Nature News)
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Scientists read dreams with brain scans

By reading brainwaves and observing the visual processing regions of sleeping brains, Japanese researchers were able to interpret a select bunch of dream images simply from neural activity. By comparing how certain regions of an awake brain fired in response to images in photos, and then comparing these to dream journals and brain activity, they were able to reconstruct exactly when the brains had the dream experience.

It’s not exactly television of the mind, but pretty cool nonetheless. Unfortunately, Pluto was not involved in this research, although his dreams are pretty easy to read.

(more at Nature News)

Source: nature.com

The Probability That You Are Dreaming Right Now? 1 in 10

When you boil it down to pure probability, there’s a shockingly high chance that you are dreaming right now. As Jan Westerhoff writes in Reality: A Very Short Introduction:

…the chances of you dreaming at this very moment are far, far greater. Let’s do a quick calculation. We optimistically assume that you get eight hours of sleep a night, which leaves sixteen hours during which you are awake. Sleep researchers have found out that there is a strong correlation between dreaming and being in so-called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. REM sleep is characterized by rapid movement of the eyeballs; the brain is highly active, its electric activity resembles that of a waking brain, but the sleeper is more difficult to wake than during slow-wave or non-REM sleep. We know that between 20% and 25% of our sleep is REM sleep. Taking the lower value and assuming that you always and only dream during REM sleep, this gives us 1.6 hours of dreaming ever night. As there are therefore 1.6 hours of dream consciousness for every 16 hours of waking consciousness, this means that your chance of dreaming at any given moment is 1 in 10.

The natural reaction is to say “Well, I can’t be dreaming right now, because I woke up this morning.” But in a metaphysical sense, one that is focused on the pure odds and defining exactly what reality is, whether you are dreaming right now or not is pretty irrelevant. 

Because it’s happening. More here.

A Vision For Tomorrow - To Boldly Go What if we could build a ship that could take hundreds of people to the moon in just three days? How about Mars in 90 days? What if we had a telescope more powerful than the Hubble, that could be moved wherever we wanted? How about being able to deliver probes, science equipment and landers to the entire near solar system within a few years? This guy thinks it can be done. More specifically, not only can it be done, it should be done. BuildTheEnterprise.org (an extremely deeply detailed website, btw) is a 20 year plan to build a $1 trillion space cruiser. It could have ion drives, a rotating gravity disk, crew quarters for hundreds of scientists and tourists. It would probably have one of those machines where you could call order any food you wanted and it would materialize in front of you. And it would look exactly like the Enterprise from Star Trek. Of course, it doesn’t have to look like the ship from the sci-fi series. Why not make it look like something else? Maybe something more … traditional? Think about this: if that world and those adventures have been able to capture the imaginations of the world, young and old, for decades … what better inspiration could we ask for? The schematics and build schedules call for $50 billion a year over 20 years, which is a drop in the bucket of our national budget. It would transform economies and unite the world’s innovators to create this ship - the pinnacle of human achievement. But most of all, it would serve as a bridge between our dreams and reality, and a seed for the scientific dreamers of tomorrow. It’s part thought experiment, part pipe dream, part social statement and part why don’t we just give this a shot already??? The project has a funding plan, complete conceptual designs, and ship specs. More than you can say for a lot of Kickstarter projects. It’s nice to dream a dream like this, based in a vision of the future that’s not as far off as your first glance makes it seem. Bonus: The time that they almost built a life-sizeEnterprise in Las Vegas. Morons. YOU SHOULD HAVE. (via BuildTheEnterprise; This artwork was done by me, and is proof that I shouldn’t be given access to Illustrator and booze after dark)
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A Vision For Tomorrow - To Boldly Go

What if we could build a ship that could take hundreds of people to the moon in just three days? How about Mars in 90 days? What if we had a telescope more powerful than the Hubble, that could be moved wherever we wanted? How about being able to deliver probes, science equipment and landers to the entire near solar system within a few years?

This guy thinks it can be done. More specifically, not only can it be done, it should be done. BuildTheEnterprise.org (an extremely deeply detailed website, btw) is a 20 year plan to build a $1 trillion space cruiser. It could have ion drives, a rotating gravity disk, crew quarters for hundreds of scientists and tourists. It would probably have one of those machines where you could call order any food you wanted and it would materialize in front of you. And it would look exactly like the Enterprise from Star Trek.

Of course, it doesn’t have to look like the ship from the sci-fi series. Why not make it look like something else? Maybe something more … traditional? Think about this: if that world and those adventures have been able to capture the imaginations of the world, young and old, for decades … what better inspiration could we ask for? The schematics and build schedules call for $50 billion a year over 20 years, which is a drop in the bucket of our national budget. It would transform economies and unite the world’s innovators to create this ship - the pinnacle of human achievement.

But most of all, it would serve as a bridge between our dreams and reality, and a seed for the scientific dreamers of tomorrow.

It’s part thought experiment, part pipe dream, part social statement and part why don’t we just give this a shot already??? The project has a funding plan, complete conceptual designs, and ship specs. More than you can say for a lot of Kickstarter projects.

It’s nice to dream a dream like this, based in a vision of the future that’s not as far off as your first glance makes it seem.

Bonus: The time that they almost built a life-sizeEnterprise in Las Vegas. Morons. YOU SHOULD HAVE.

(via BuildTheEnterprise; This artwork was done by me, and is proof that I shouldn’t be given access to Illustrator and booze after dark)

Source: buildtheenterprise.org

Dream Movements Translate to Real Life Any lucid dreamers out there? Thanks to neural imaging and this very realistic state of dreaming, scientists have shown that the movements you dream about fire the same neurons as the real-life action. Whether we’re falling or flying, dancing or driving, moving in our dreams feels very real to us at the time. And our brains, it seems, agree. By imaging the brains of sleeping subjects, researchers have found that when we move in our dreams, our brains fire in the same pattern as when we move in the real world. Because we tend to forget our dreams as soon as we wake up, researchers know little about how our minds create them. Neuroscientists Martin Dresler and Michael Czisch, both of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, and their colleagues wanted to find a way to use brain-imaging techniques to watch what people were doing in their dreams. To interpret these images of the dreaming brain, however, they would first have to know how the brain looks when it is performing a certain task in the dream—a difficult challenge because most dreamers can’t control what they’re doing. Very rarely, however, dreamers experience a phenomenon known as lucid dreaming, in which a sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming and has some level of control over actions in the dream. (via ScienceNOW; Painting: “The Sleeping Gypsy“ by Henri Rosseau)
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Dream Movements Translate to Real Life

Any lucid dreamers out there? Thanks to neural imaging and this very realistic state of dreaming, scientists have shown that the movements you dream about fire the same neurons as the real-life action.

Whether we’re falling or flying, dancing or driving, moving in our dreams feels very real to us at the time. And our brains, it seems, agree. By imaging the brains of sleeping subjects, researchers have found that when we move in our dreams, our brains fire in the same pattern as when we move in the real world.

Because we tend to forget our dreams as soon as we wake up, researchers know little about how our minds create them. Neuroscientists Martin Dresler and Michael Czisch, both of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, and their colleagues wanted to find a way to use brain-imaging techniques to watch what people were doing in their dreams. To interpret these images of the dreaming brain, however, they would first have to know how the brain looks when it is performing a certain task in the dream—a difficult challenge because most dreamers can’t control what they’re doing.

Very rarely, however, dreamers experience a phenomenon known as lucid dreaming, in which a sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming and has some level of control over actions in the dream.

(via ScienceNOW; Painting: “The Sleeping Gypsy“ by Henri Rosseau)

Source: news.sciencemag.org