In one ear right out the other
A researcher at New York University called Moran Cerf has produced an article for the science journal Nature [On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons, Nature 467] in which he claims it may soon be possible to create a device that records our dreams and plays them back later.
Obviously, the reality is 909% less exciting than it initially appears. It won’t be a magic pipe you stick in your ear that etches your wildest imaginings directly onto a Blu-Ray disc for you to enjoy boring your friends with later.
What Cerf is actually proposing is a way to make other people’s dreams seem even more boring. But first: the business of capturing them, which all boils down to neurons. After studying the brains of people with electronic implants buried deep in their noggins, Cerf discovered that certain groups of neurons “lit up” when he asked his subjects to think about specific things, such as Marilyn Monroe or the Eiffel Tower. Therefore, he postulates, by recording these subjects’ sleeping brain activity, then studying the patterns generated, it should be possible to work out whether they were dreaming about starlets or landmarks. In other words, he’s isolated the stuff that dreams are made of. And it turns out to be a few blips on a chart.
{ The Guardian | BBC }
Imagine being able to control a computer with your mind. It’s not fantasy, that just happened.
Twelve subjects sat in front of a computer and looked at two superimposed images on a screen, focusing their mind on one of the pictures. The computer responded by making the image stronger while fading the other image away until only one was visible. They picked the image they wanted to look at, and made it so.
All the subjects had epilepsy, and had fine wires inside their brains to monitor seizures. These wires were attached to neurons and connected to the computer.
This new research published in Nature [On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons, Nature 467] could shed light on how information is used in the brain, and how interactions between single brain cells let us make decisions.
