Here’s something they could try:
Hook up the cat with the electrodes and get the real-time visuals up on a computer monitor.
Then get the cat to look directly at the monitor!
What would be on the monitor then? Or would the universe just implode? 
Poor cat he will go crazy… So many monitors, one inside the other… 
We will at last know if cats can hallucinate… 
Or he will be able to see the next level of reality…
In fact, the quality of the picture will just became worse and worse, because information is lost in all links of the cycle… In several minutes, we will get a gray screen and nothing more…
Perhaps you don’t have to. It seems a neural network can learn the information from another by reproducing his inputs and outputs. So you will have fewer electrods (just 10000000). 
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/471786.stm
it stands to reason that this would work for things hallucianted and therefore dreamed… and i do believe cats dream… i wonder if they had the sense to see if they could see a cats dreams…
By recording the electrical activity of nerve cells in the thalamus, a region of the brain that receives signals from the eyes, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley were able to view these shapes.
The team used what they describe as a “linear decoding technique” to convert the signals from the stimulated cells into visual images.
By being able to tap directly into the brain and extract a visual image the researchers have produced a “brain interface” that may one day allow the control of artificial organs and indeed machines by thought alone. It is also conceivable that, given time, it will be possible to record what one person sees and “play it back” to someone else either as it is happening or at a later date.
…
scary if abused, and surely it will be, right? if we can do it “wirelessly” one day? Right… damn.
More over, they said that "it could prove a breakthrough in the hoped-for ability to wire artificial limbs directly into the brain and could lead to :
- artificial brain extensions like extra data storage or processing power or the ability to control devices just by thinking about them.
- machines with brain interfaces."
Not very far from “Ghost in the Shell”, isn’t it ?
This has be done in 1999. I wonder if they made some progress…
Another funny experience about what rats are dreaming :
“The researchers examined REM episodes recorded while the rats slept. About half repeated the unique signature of brain activity that was created as the animal ran. The correlation was so close that the researchers found that as the animal dreamed, they could reconstruct where it would be in the maze if it were awake and whether the animal was dreaming of running or standing still.”
I’ve spent some time thinking about this and I have 2 opinions on the matter:
On one hand, it could be really good for Dream Recall and may unlock some secrets of dreams. You’ll be able to look up dream signs in detail.
But on the other hand, if you buy one and you’re siblings/parents/husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend want to know what you dream about, and they hook you up to it without you knowing, they may not like what you dream about. Some things are better left unsaid, same with dreams.
So it’s hard to choose.
But yes, I think it’s possible.
I believe that it is possible. Back a few centuries ago people would have said it was impossible to record life onto video, as everybody would percieve colours and things in a different manner. But I’m quite sure it’ll be beyond all of our lifetimes.
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/472796.stm
There you go. The cat experiment covered by BBC. Interesting!
After seeing those blurry images and reading some articles about the cat experiment, I’m stunned! This will lead to amazing discoveries about existence - specially when we can record dreams.
I don’t think that “some things are best left unsaid” for everyone. Some people might feel uneasy about others seeing their sometimes bestial dreams, but I think this would require human ethics to open new doors. Everyone has dreams - from sick nightmares to, yes, sick pleasure dreams. The waking mind is not the same as the dreaming mind. I’ve dreamt countless of sick and bizarre dreams, and many of them have been enjoyable - although sickening when I woke up. Perhaps people will be more humble towards each other when they see what others dreams, and what they dream themselves, it will also teach us about what we go through while trying to remain sane and lawful.
I don’t think that most peoples’ dreams are insane, but we should not go hypocritical on our nature and try to hide away from our selves. We would rather grow on being able to handle how we think.
I embrace these new technologies. It would be fun
I dont think this is a worthy comment - the whole reason we live is because we have no brain… no brain, no life, we cannot transplant brains (yet) no man has been given a pigs brain or anything, its just not possible.
If you took out your brain, u cease to exist anymore. All the things you see and hear are interpretations of the world around through several systems all linking to your brain, the 5 senses.
I was thinking, it would perhaps be possible to send a beam of lazer-optics to penetrate the brain/thalemus to reach the neurons and decipher the information onto a computer leading to a television, another way (although extremely dangerous) would be to use raidation…
what do you think?
I think this is very possible and I hope it is realised in our lifetime…
- Silva
I’m not convinced by the cat experiment. And I still believe it’s impossible to record dreams on tape, because this would reduce the whole dreaming experience to empirical data. That just doesn’t make any sense to me. Dreaming is a fully subjective experience, and the only way to deal with it is by means of interpretation. Scientific methods however don’t show any of this interpretation. They’re only capable of denoting the objects without submitting any value to them. Compare it with the thinking process: scientists think the mind is the result of brain activity. However, they can fully dissect the brain and monitor every synaptic change or anything, but they will never be able to empirically derive data from the thinking process itself. Scientists can only detect the physiological changes correlated with the thinking process, not the thinking process itself. To know anything about that, the scientist need to start a dialogue with the test subject and interprete his thoughts. And still they keep saying the mind is the result of brain activity. This is very strange really… because the mind has very different properties than the brain from which it apparently originates: the brain can be seen and denoted, but it doesn’t show any gradations of value. However, if we look at the mind, we cannot see it visually, nor can we denote it, because the only way to understand the mind is through interpretation and dialogue. Thereby, the mind has an inherent structure of values: dreams can be expressions of joy, fear, grief,… but this can never be seen on the brainwave EEG (theta waves are not particularly more beautiful than delta waves). This to me proves the brain and the mind are highly correlated, but they cannot be reduced to each other. Therefore, reducing a subjective mind experience, a dream in this case, to fully objective data, will never succeed properly. The only thing they will get is a highly distorted outcome because it only depicts one aspect of the whole experience, namely the empirical derived changes in the brain which don’t need any interpretation.
The cat experiment only proves it’s possible to see what the cat EYES see. Not what the CAT sees. Then the visual information is mixed with a lot of things (memories, emotions) and it’s perhaps impossible to retrieve them in a video form.
…But perhaps we could graft a cat brain directly on ours, 
…so we can experience directly what he feels and dreams. Who wants to be the human guinea-pig ?
~ Basilus West, mad scientist ~
As I programmer, I know how to deal with data. It is a pain in the a’ss some times, and I do not think that deciphering a brain and all it’s emotional reactions and empirical data can be less of a pain in comparison. To store a dream on a video casette would be no more than to record the decipherable audio/visual data for viewing and analysing at a later time. I do not think that the video format would work on anything else. But, on the other hand, computers can do more than this.
Imagine recording the data into a memory matrix, where a computer simulation could be based on that data to make a recreation. This is something that could unveil profound new possabilities. A 3D simulation that processed emotions and everything else emitted in the brain. Then a human would tap into this and relive the dream. This is possible - it is only a matter of time.
What will be a problem is the subatomic processes. But we do not know how much of a percent of magnitude these processes make out - so it’s really hard to take into account. But try not to think so much in terms of storage media in opposition to what signals can be extracted from the brain. Where to store or recreate we have to think about later. We can’t press a dream into a common media format, we have to create a new format to fit the data. That’s what they did with DVDs, that’s what they did with Direct3D and openGL. That’s what they are gonna do with dreams, too.
To reply to the rest of your post, relating to the mind-body seperation in science, I suggest you pick up a copy of Dreaming Reality by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrell. They interpret dreams fantastically, with a theory to wrap it all up in. They observe why people dream in symbols, why this relieves the built-up introspections of the previous day, etc, etc. Fascinating read.
Altogether, they interpret about 17 dreams, plus the seminal dreams of Freud and Jung.
If you can stomach it (it’s pretty hard), you can try for their older book. It’s rather harder to read with phrases like “activated drive schemata” and “emotionally arousing introspections”. 
Erm… ok I’ll look for it
But can you give some of the key points of their theory, and how this is related to my post?
By the way, conventional science doesn’t separate mind from the body. To the contrary, it reduces the mind completely to body mechanics. And this overall reductionism is wrong imo, and that’s why I think you can never get dreams on tape.
Thx for the suggestion 
You seemed to say scientists try to consider everything as happening “with the brain”. I was reminded of a quote from the back: “THe bridge between neurophysiology and psychology”. I thought it took a perhaps different view from that you mentioned in your post.
Ah yes ok scientists indeed consider everything happening with the brain. But I don’t believe most of these theories, so I’ll probably like the bridge-theory as described in the book you mentioned 
In future it will be possible thats for sure!
If you can effort it, thats a antoher thing
Why do you think so?
Ha! This must be one of those extremely rare times we seem to disagree on something 