Thread: Scientists Discover Way to Record Dreams...

Hey guys. I didn't see a thread for this in search, although there are many about the speculation of what it would be like if we could record our dreams.

Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV-Q51P-WZw

Articles:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ap-dreams.html
http://www.physorg.com/news148193433.html
http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets...chine-2009046/


How do you guys feel about this? Personally, it terrifies me. I don't want anyone but myself inside of my head.

That seems like it completly negates the need for a dream journal.
And as for what I think about it - I think I would do it, but only if I was the only person able to see the results, unless I wanted to share it. It could be a great way to show off an awsome dream, but I've had a few embarrasing dreams that I would probably store away on a DVD and leave to rot in my basement.

It seems to me that they haven't conclusively proven that they can image dreams. They have only been able to reproduce images that people were actually looking at. Without really knowing about the technology, I'd say it is still possible that the brain processes actual images differently than it processes imagined images. Then again, they could be essentially the same thing. It all depends if the technology depends on information actually transmitted by the optic nerves.

What really scares me is where this technology is going to go... Just the fact that they're able to take images you're thinking about and put them, although rather blurry, onto a computer screen is a pretty huge thing.

They're calling it "the dream machine." I'll bet this technology will have advanced very far in five years.

Yeah, it seems that the military has dibs on the latest technologies. You don't want them getting inside our minds. On the other hand, recording your dreams would be great! But so far they only got blurry visuals. They need auditory and kinesthetice and emotional recording devices as well. And playback methods.

In the right hands, this technology has some good potential for entertainment. But what else is good about it? Aren't dreams supposed to be private?

People who master LD could make money directing dream-movies
I'm interested. Hope this develops further. Hope that it's gonna be used responsibly

Haha. It's the year 2100: The government has super-satellites in space that record the thinking processes of every human on earth, and stores them in a database. All who have rebellious thoughts against the government would have their doors kicked in by a special task force, and be made to "disappear." Sounds like the plot to a very interesting sci-fi movie.

How cool would it be, though, to not have to record your dreams anymore - you could just watch them on playback. You could now remember 20 dreams every night! (Or not even remember - you can just watch them!). That would be absolutely amazing!

Since I was about 6 I talked about and fantasized about how to it would be to have a technology like this. Record stuff with it and make awesome movies with awesome effects effortlessly. You can also share ideas more effectively than talking, they would literally get the picture.

I also tried silly things with my brother like syncing our thoughts together by sticking each end of a composite video into each of our ears.

Originally Posted by Clyde Machine

Correction: SomeONE will abuse this. Doesn't have to be limited to a government.

True.

Originally Posted by LiveInTheDream

I don't think we need to worry about mass-brain-scans just yet. The person had to be inserted into a chamber in order to just get an unclear image...so it's going to be a long while before it's reduced down to something like a headset, much less a device that can scan from a distance.

So personally I'm not scared, even though I understand the possible implications. I'll probably be dead before the technology advances enough to be a threat

I wouldn't be so sure about that.
If you were alive in the 70's, would you have thought that a computer would fit in your pocket as early as 2010? (The Iphone came out in 2007, and the smartphones before that were not popular enough or powerful enough to qualify as a full computer. Even on the Iphone, the app store wasn't out until 2008)
People always think that technology is advancing much slower than it actually is. Nobody talked in terabytes until the 2000s, and petabyte isn't even in the spellcheck yet, even though the first petabyte harddrive for consumers is coming out within two years. Google is already dealing with more data in three days than the entire written human record, and within 50-100 years, if technology continues at this rate, we'll be dealing with files larger than every word ever spoken, ever, on a day to day basis.
In the 30's, people thought building rockets to escape the Earth's atmosphere was insane. It happened in the 50's.
Nobody has any idea what the world will look like, even as early as 2020.
The point is, don't think you're safe because you'll be dead before it happens, unless you have some terminal illness or are old enough to die in the next 20 years.

EDIT: The forums tried to swallow up my post, but copy-paste saved it. Now you get to read my technology rant that LiveInTheDream started me on!

It would be unbelievably awesome if you could go to sleep wearing that kit (maybe inside a comfy hat if they get the size down!), then if you have an epic dream, share it with your friends. Also, you could post it to your Dreamviews dream journal "Video Thread"!

It obviously needs a lot of work, and what I just described seems like fantasy, but I'm still excited. I don't think any organisation or government would actually abuse it. An invasion of privacy that severe would provoke open revolution among ordinary citizens. It would be sweet if you could have one of your own though, for personal use.

I think that government/organizations would definitely abuse it... because if it could completely read pictures coming from your mind, it could probably read your thoughts.

There's been a thread on this already. And I explained WHY (many times in the same thread) this type of technology will NEVER (EVER) be able to record your thoughts or dreams. Nobody listened and I'm sure they won't this time either, but if you care to know why, look at the other thread.
http://www.dreamviews.com/community/...ight=read+mind

Originally Posted by tommo

There's been a thread on this already. And I explained WHY (many times in the same thread) this type of technology will NEVER (EVER) be able to record your thoughts or dreams. Nobody listened and I'm sure they won't this time either, but if you care to know why, look at the other thread.
http://www.dreamviews.com/community/...ight=read+mind

Wow. I just read through that topic and nobody even noticed you. Let me reply to your original post that you said you wrote while drunk:

Originally Posted by tommo

Oh My God.... Ok someone in the 'who here is not a druggie' just mentioned Idiocracy, so I watched it. I fear now that it is coming true.
GUYS, READ THE ARTICLE!

No it's not misleading. It says what it is. They got people to look at some images for 12 seconds. The computer (fMRI) mapped the blood flow changes in their brain. NOW when they think of the images again, the computer recognises the blood flow changes that correlated to the image.

E.G I look at the number 4. Pattern A happens.
I look at the number 3. Pattern B happens.

The computer records the patterns of blood flow through the fMRI.

Next time I think of the number 4 the computer looks at the blood flow through the fMRI and realises I am looking at number 4 because the blood flow is Pattern A and not Pattern B.

This is ALL that is happening. They are not going to be able to show visuals of dreams using this technique it would be way to complex.

Cummon guys, I'm drunk and I could understand that perfectly!

While right now, it would be totally absurd to actually record a dream, in 50-100 years, it could be a possibility.
Compare it to computers. If you told someone working on one of the first computers in the 1940's that in 70 years not only would computers be so common that 90% of the US had at least one, but also that they would fit in the palm of your hand, have speeds measured in gigahertz, harddrives at all, but especially storage measured in terabytes and now even petabytes, you would be called a complete drunk moron (runon sentence, I know). Not many people would have predicted the internet 70 years ago (although some people predicted it in the first decade of the 20th century, it wasn't looked at as plausible.)
The thing is, we live with Moore's law. Technology doubles every year and a half or so. While today, some technologies (like this) are ridiculous, we don't know where technology will lead us 70 years from now.

Basically, you said why this technoogy is not able to record your thoughts and dreams today, not ever.

Ah my reply didn't post and got lost. God dammit.

In short. This is the wrong method is what I'm saying. You would have to record every possible thing and combination of things that people could think of. For every single person on Earth. It is the wrong method of doing this. I'm not saying it can't be done. Just that it can't be done this way.

I agree with JD. there are simply to many indians and not enough chiefs. IF this were abused anarchy would ensue. when governments are no longer useful they fall.

People can read our writing. People can hack our computers. People can spy on us via satellites.

Our minds are pretty much the only thing left we have control and privacy over.

Seems like Japan has beaten us to a dream machine project. That stuff looks high tech. What will the Japanese create next?

Thats pretty funny, did you see pac-man?
You cant really take that experiment seriously. An X is opposite and 0, Any computer program that is able to configure an x will only know how to configure the opposite character as a freakin' rule of nature. Timing seems to have been the proof of the experiment.

The technology isn't even close to that level right now. For now, we can't actually record dreams.
We won't know the answer to that question until the technology progresses to the point at which we can actually get images, which isn't for a few decades.