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Scientists Might Be Able to Watch and Record Dreams
If your idea of fun is letting people see what you dream and picture in your head, you might want to sign up for this study. A group of Japanese researchers successfully displayed an image using electrical signals from the brain, a revolutionary feat they hope will let them visualize dreams.
The scientists from ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories are the first people to ever visualize what we see by studying brain activity. The study focuses on the process in which the retina recognizes an image, converts it into electrical signals that are interpreted by the brain's visual cortex. So far, they've only been able to recreate simple images -- in this case, the letters of the word "neuron" -- but they hope the technology will let them watch and record dreams.
We're not exactly sure if this will be used to determine why people dream or have applications in psychotherapy, but it's pretty interesting stuff. While we're fine keeping our dreams to ourselves, would you let scientists watch what you picture at night, provided they don't tell your significant other? [From: Daily Mail]
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Comments
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Subscribe to commentsErik CraigDec 21st 2008 12:49PM
Ah, our human hubris rears its head yet again. We still have not even close to understanding the mysteries of the simple thing we call the human mind, the extraordinary capacity for expeience and thought, especially creative, imagistic thought that comes with being a human being. We are really just beginning to understand the brain, its functions, capacities, components, etc., but these all together do not a single mind make.
Although I actually believe we may replace our own humanity with robotics and so-called artificial intelligence someday, that carbon-based oxygen demanding human nature's only lasting progeny may be humanoid and not human, again a humanoid no human is.
This achievement is not even on the order of something like the discovery that round objects roll and can be used to move things. Indeed, it is not clear that all the computer science in the world could have discovered, in the true intuitive sense of the word discover (i.e, autonomously - vs. programmatically - apprehend the meaning and implications of a phenomenon) the meaning of a wheel.
On the one hand, since the human species will not likely survive the next 1 million years, let alone the next 100 million, we'd better keep on discovering as much as possible about ourselves and about the mysteries of life to keep ourselves or our robotic progeny extant for as long as possible. On the other hand, at the rate the humans species seems intractably inclined to destroy life, its own and other, for its own gratification, keeping ourselves alive may be the most destructive thing we can do not only to ourselves but to our planet.
Hubris, hubris: if only we could put our scientific inventiveness to the task of understanding and enhancing ethics, morality, beauty, creativity, kindness and the like,, and do so with the humiltiy of the ant, we'd likely be better off.