Japanese scientists have found a way to decipher dreams for the very first time.
Their report shows that patterns of activity in certain visual parts of the brain are the same whether we are awake or dreaming.
Researchers from ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, scanned three male volunteers’ brains in an exhausting test over several days to examine how activity could be related to their dreams.
Analyzing more than 200 dream reports—some 30–45 hours of interviews with each of three participants—Kamitani and his colleagues built a “dream-trained decoder” based on fMRI imagery of the V1, V2, and V3 areas of the visual cortex. “We find some rule, or mapping, or pattern between what the person is seeing and what activity is happening in the brain,” Kamitani explains. And it worked, according to Kamitani, who presented the results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans in October 2012, predicting whether or not the 20 objects occurred in dreams with 75–80 percent accuracy.
At an even more basic level, the decoder could help scientists understand what’s happening in the brain during dreaming. “To create this whole virtual world out of nothing—with no visual input or auditory input—is quite fascinating and undoubtedly very complex,” Zadra says. “This research will certainly help us better understand what brain areas are doing what, to even allow for this to happen.”
In Kamitani’s study, for example, the researchers found that areas of higher-level visual processing, which respond to more abstract features, were more useful for interpreting dream content than lower-level processing areas. This makes sense, given that those lower areas of the visual cortex are more closely connected to the direct input from the retina. But, Kamitani notes, this could simply have to do with the way the study was designed. “We didn’t train the decoder with low-level visual features,” such as shape or contrast, he says. “We just used the semantic category information.”
Indeed, given the richness of the dreaming experience, such visual qualities may well be encoded during sleep. “Your brain creates a whole virtual world for you when you are dreaming, complete with characters, settings, interactions, dialogues,” says Zadra. “But you’re actually in your bed asleep; there is no visual input. So your brain is literally creating this virtual world from A to Z.”
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