Recording dreams

I've often thought that it would be very cool to be able to record dreams and then play them back and analyze them later. It appears that maybe that will be possible at some point. Awhile ago, I saw this article about how scientists have been able to extract images from the brain. The beginning of the article says:

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep. The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow.

I was a bit skeptical of whether this could be for real so I consulted a friend of mine who has done research in a related field. Here is what he said:

The research is certainly for real, and I can see why it would work. That said, I'm a little bit skeptical about some of the extrapolation (say to reading dream images). The optic nerve heads into the visual cortex, and I think the individual nerves in the optic nerve bundle maintain a geometric configuration similar to the rods and cones on the back of the retina. So when the electrical signals for an image hit the visual cortex, there is going to be a fair amount of spatial localization. I'm guessing that there is then a pretty distinct brain activation footprint in the visual cortex when these stark black-and-white images are shown, yielding a strong correlation between an images shape and the "shape" of the activation pattern in the visual cortex. And that's what they are exploiting. Very cool.

Now take the case of extracting images from memory. I don't know how much involvement there is from the visual cortex in calling up an image from memory. If the visual cortex is involved in the same way as when the image is actually being viewed, then I believe it might be possible. If other areas of the brain are involved and not the visual cortex, I doubt there would be such a distinct "footprint" on an fMRI scan. (In other words, it isn't clear that thinking about an image of the letter "n" would activate a section of the brain in a distinct spatial pattern different from thinking about any other letter). (But maybe this has already been proved---it's not my area.)

On applying fMRI to the "reading" of people's emotions, that can totally work. There seem to be pretty distinct activation patterns for different rough emotions across the brain. As the technology gets better, we'll see a lot more of that.

Very cool stuff.

So perhaps I will be able to record my dreams someday. Not sure if that will be a blessing or a curse but it would certainly be very cool technology.