So yeah, just found out about this earlier, and I’m properly impressed. As of now, I don’t think they’re near being able to record dreams, but as all of this is currently rather new I am very hopeful that the ability to do such a thing will be acquired in time. Of course, the bulky equipment needed to do this would make it unreasonable for personal use, but you never know what scientists are going to do nowadays. (Seriously, particles possibly moving faster than light have been observed quite recently as well)
Anyways, I’ll just post this now so people can actually read it.
Yes I also like the idea of BCI (brain-computer-interface), but actually in both directions. Also for new input methods it might be a good start. Or for visualizing dreams Though that might actually be a bit hard, because human thoughts (and such are dreams) can not exactly be recorded and replayed by any other medium than a human brain I think. Or well, maybe they can be recorded with decent accuracy by digital media, but in order to experience a dream somewhat had, I think it would be necessary to upload it to your own brain.
As for making such things usable for common persons, that’s not what scientists do. That’s an engineer’s task
From the article: “…system recorded the brain’s blood flow through their brains’ visual cortex…”. One has to wonder whether it(the visual cortex) is used for dream images as well…
Yeah, that’s one of the questions I’m also saddled with.
In general, though, I like this discovery because this points to the possibility that in the future (and hopefully in my lifetime) it will become possible to at least record and playback some aspects of dreams. There are things that happen in my dreams that are very hard to explain and I’d love to be able to show people that.
Yeah, I’ve always though that it’d be awesome to be able to record dreams and the like, but usually laughed it off as wistful thinking. Now that it seems they’ve actually gotten somewhere I have some true hope that it’ll be possible some day. Sounds like a cool profession to get into.
Also, I wonder what could be learned by doing similar tests on other animals. It’d be cool to know what my cat is thinking(visually, though it’d be interesting if they were able to record audio from the brain), how he dreams and what about.
Though that might actually be a bit hard, because human thoughts (and such are dreams) can not exactly be recorded and replayed by any other medium than a human brain I think. Or well, maybe they can be recorded with decent accuracy by digital media, but in order to experience a dream somewhat had, I think it would be necessary to upload it to your own brain.
