Dreams Reconstructed Using FMRI with Pattern Recognition

Isn't it an amazing thing to be able to see your dreams in a recorded video so that you can actually see your dreams after you wake up? Well, let's see how scientists are trying to do so...

Facts about Dreams

Actually, this is not a very new idea for scientists and it trials originated since 2009, the Japanese were trying to catch dreams since that time. Now since that time, there are many advances in various technological fields that might aid tremendously in the progress of dreams reconstruction.

Some of the technologies that contribute to achieving such a goal are Artificial Intelligence in addition to advancements in FMRI machines as well. Furthermore, faster supercomputers are becoming much faster.



First of all, an FMRI should be used to monitor the brain activity of many volunteers, this is a long process that needs intensive machine learning in order to be able to translate brain activity into images that are gathered together and become a continuous clip.

Such a process is impossible if it wasn't integrated with Artificial Intelligence technologies that are looking promising in such domains as this can be one of the ways to utilize such technologies, but why do we need Artificial Intelligence?

The process itself is daunting; as first scientists will have to acquire brain activity then link it to the many images the person is seeing. But then, they will need to be able to interpret brain activity to the various images seen in the dream. So how will scientists be able to link images to brain activity?

This can happen by showing tens of wake people the image of a house, a ball or a cat for example. Then, they'll have to teach the Artificial Intelligence the various brain activities to the various images seen. After acquiring a dictionary of brain activities linked to various images seen, they'll be able to interpret dreams that are mainly images. Easy Right?

But, yes there is always a but, in this case, there are many buts! One of which is that various people don't have the same brain activity to the same images seen! As each person will interpret the same image in a different way, thus brain activity will also be different!

8 rare cases that can actually happen

If you have watched the House series; in one of the episodes a patient is conscious but unable to show any physical response, they connect him to a machine and ask him to "Think UP". Then they wait for a very long time until he becomes able to move a cursor up via interpreting his brain activity. In that episode, the patient's response is just Up or Down to the many questions asked (they asked him yes-no questions). But that is just nothing compared to converting brain activity to a video stream or even scattered images.

Another difficulty is that dreams are not just a series of images passing by our heads, as many of us know, dreams are not in real-time, some scientists think that the longest dream is just 20-30 min during which people feel as if they were dreaming for the whole night. Others get the feeling that their dream was much more lengthy compared to the time they slept.

Even if converting dreams to a video is still far from scientist reach right no but the more they go a step forward towards achieving this idea the more we can benefit from it. How is that? If we could just be able to interpret brain activities of locked up patients and convert them to images that would be a great achievement. You might want to see Jack Gallant's lecture in the world economic forum for further info about where great people like him are doing to progress into Dreams Reconstruction!

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