New Technology Could Enable You To Record And Reconstruct Your Own Dreams!

I decided to dedicate a thread to this link, which I have from Box77, who a while ago had put it into: http://www.dreamviews.com/science-ma...kthroughs.html

Scientists Reconstruct Brains' Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment

The article itself contains a bit of the euphoria and enthusiasm this elicits in me - check this out - it's fantastic!!

I wonder how many conversations I might have had, posts I made and read, which were basically about how it would be the ultimate art form to lucid dream and export your creations and share them with others. I might look some of it up, and I will try to make people aware of this thread in other subforums - it would fit in so many contexts...

The option of direct mind recordings would be heaven for every creativity orientated person and especially every lucid dreamer, wouldn't it?! The other senses will eventually follow besides visual perception and imagination I would think. Probably audio will be next.

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UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

I just can't believe this is happening for real, but according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—
"this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

Indeed, it's mindblowing. I'm simultaneously excited and terrified. This is how it works:

They used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain's blood flow through their brains' visual cortex.

The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity.

An 18-million-second picture palette

After recording this information, another group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie. Although the resulting video is low resolution and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects.

Think about those 18 million seconds of random videos as a painter's color palette. A painter sees a red rose in real life and tries to reproduce the color using the different kinds of reds available in his palette, combining them to match what he's seeing. The software is the painter and the 18 million seconds of random video is its color palette. It analyzes how the brain reacts to certain stimuli, compares it to the brain reactions to the 18-million-second palette, and picks what more closely matches those brain reactions. Then it combines the clips into a new one that duplicates what the subject was seeing. Notice that the 18 million seconds of motion video are not what the subject is seeing. They are random bits used just to compose the brain image.

Given a big enough database of video material and enough computing power, the system would be able to re-create any images in your brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMA23JJ1M1o

In this other video you can see how this process worked in the three experimental targets. On the top left square you can see the movie the subjects were watching while they were in the fMRI machine. Right below you can see the movie "extracted" from their brain activity. It shows that this technique gives consistent results independent of what's being watched—or who's watching. The three lines of clips next to the left column show the random movies that the computer program used to reconstruct the visual information.

Right now, the resulting quality is not good, but the potential is enormous. Lead research author—and one of the lab test bunnies—Shinji Nishimoto thinks this is the first step to tap directly into what our brain sees and imagines:

Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie. In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.

The brain recorders of the future

Imagine that. Capturing your visual memories, your dreams, the wild ramblings of your imagination into a video that you and others can watch with your own eyes.

This is the first time in history that we have been able to decode brain activity and reconstruct motion pictures in a computer screen. The path that this research opens boggles the mind. It reminds me of Brainstorm, the cult movie in which a group of scientists lead by Christopher Walken develops a machine capable of recording the five senses of a human being and then play them back into the brain itself.

This new development brings us closer to that goal which, I have no doubt, will happen at one point. Given the exponential increase in computing power and our understanding of human biology, I think this will arrive sooner than most mortals expect. Perhaps one day you would be able to go to sleep wearing a flexible band labeled Sony Dreamcam around your skull. [UC Berkeley]

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Heyy!! :happyface: Thanks for the mention! I wanted to add here, that this application could be used as a very interesting tool for dream recalling. In its first stages I mean, before one will be able to precisely record all the imagery, it could be used as a reference to recall events and/or dreamscapes. It'd blow my mind if I dreamed about certain dreamscape for example, and then I can recall how it looked like by seeing just a blurry image of it, I don't think it'd be too hard, although perhaps some artistic technique should be needed or some artist's help.

Ah - so this thread does indeed get some views, as visible outside of it - and once there arrives a like on it - I'm always excited and think - now, now somebody said something...:roll:
Na well - maybe it is so overwhelmingly amazing, that words fail you guys and gals?! :tongue:
Anyway - this is in my eyes the most fascinating neuroscientific stuff when it comes to the future of (not only) dreaming, I really think so! Hopefully they have all the money they want to throw at it - hopefully there will be news around it coming up continuously!

:dreaming:

Yeah recording dreams in HD quality would be pretty awesom!.. Imagine instead of youtube, there would be a dreamtube. Where every one are uploading their dreams.:yeah

Yes - it would be the ultimate artform - one could claim such a thing quite easily, if you as lucid artist would be able to take on board all other perception-modes and transmit your dreams in full sensory and maybe even emotional immersion, fully-fledged virtual realities, possibly to the specifications of your "customers". If this were reality, it would surely motivate many people all over the globe to learn lucid dreaming themselves!

Default would then probably be, that you actually go through exactly what the artist went through - or you could maybe also only transmit the dream environment and DCs and a sort of inner coherence coming with it, so that you can interact as the "consuming" dreamer, maybe including an overall mood, or aim at all sorts of interesting intermediate effects... Excising the actual first person perspective - I suspect, you'd need extremely strong computers for such a thing and probably also quite groundbreaking new insights into the neuroscience of consciousness. It could even turn into the prime tool for affiliated fields of science and for philosophy! What would the concept of a DC in such a scenario mean for instance? An artificial sentience on the computer side of affairs? Parts of you ghosting in your work, metaphorically speaking? The "receiver" ghosting in externalized parts of your inner realm, which you've let loose on the world? Just rambling about a bit...
There's still a lot of pushing science fiction into the realms of science and ultimately history to be done here, certainly!

But aren't wild wishful speculations just a wonderful past-time?! :wink:

Yeah I've read about it before!

Actors and singers, kiss your jobs goodbye!! :chuckle:

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But aren't wild wishful speculations just a wonderful past-time?!

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Yeah but now I kind of developed a craving for a dreamtube just because of that.. :(:)

Weell - up you get and into science! If only that were so easy, though, especially for an old woman...:wink:

Holy fudge cakes!

This is some spectacular stuff. I wonder if we can get to the stage where near perfect visual transcription is possible from brain to computer, could the opposite be true too? If we could construct a neural vocabulary of a particular individual, we could possibly use electrical stimulation of their brain to recreate those images. This is all speculative but exciting to think about.

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Originally Posted by DeviantThinker

Holy fudge cakes!

This is some spectacular stuff. I wonder if we can get to the stage where near perfect visual transcription is possible from brain to computer, could the opposite be true too? If we could construct a neural vocabulary of a particular individual, we could possibly use electrical stimulation of their brain to recreate those images. This is all speculative but exciting to think about.

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The opposite seems different case and technology. This one uses observation, fmri. BUT, getting this far is a huge step towards that, now being able to know the neural map. Now, all we need to do is to devise a way to be able to stimulate these neurons to create these imagery in our heads... And not fry our noodles doing that XD

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Originally Posted by DeviantThinker

Holy fudge cakes!

This is some spectacular stuff. I wonder if we can get to the stage where near perfect visual transcription is possible from brain to computer, could the opposite be true too? If we could construct a neural vocabulary of a particular individual, we could possibly use electrical stimulation of their brain to recreate those images. This is all speculative but exciting to think about.

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Originally Posted by LouaiB

The opposite seems different case and technology. This one uses observation, fmri. BUT, getting this far is a huge step towards that, now being able to know the neural map. Now, all we need to do is to devise a way to be able to stimulate these neurons to create these imagery in our heads... And not fry our noodles doing that XD

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Yeah - reading out is one thing - but delivering it back to a brain is another thing altogether, esp. so that it "mistakes" it for reality, or can chose to take it for reality, and the dream can actually be lived through by somebody else. But I guess, from finding out, how pictures are represented, there is a lot to be learned about this neural vocabulary and how to directly talk back to the brain.

But then - maybe the brain would do half the job by learning to integrate with another mind, once a connection is given - like this feedback-loop which's emergence surprised the scientists in this endeavour: Brain-to-brain interface transmits information from one rat to another | Mo Costandi | Science | theguardian.com

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_qbkYDlhDY

In one experiment, Nicolelis and his colleagues placed rats into a box containing two levers, and trained the animals to press one of them whenever it lit up, or to poke their noses into one of two different-sized holes in order to get a drink. They then trained another group of rats to perform both tasks while their brains were stimulated with electrodes implanted into the motor cortex, which controls movement, or the somatosensory cortex, which processes touch information, mostly from the whiskers. In this way, the second group of animals learned the gist of both tasks and became accustomed to pressing one of the levers and poking their noses into one of the holes, depending on the frequency of the electrical stimulation.

The rats were then paired up, placed in separate boxes, and their brains electronically linked – animals from the first group (the "encoders") had recording electrodes implanted into their motor cortex, and the implants were connected, via a computer, to the stimulating electrodes implanted into animals from the second group (the "decoders"). Next, each encoder rat was made to perform the lever-pressing task again, and while they did so, the pattern of brain activity encoding their behavioural responses was transmitted to the decoder.

The researchers found that the decoder rats could learn to perform the same movements, and successfully complete the task, guided solely by the information they received from the brains of the encoder rats. Likewise, when the implants were embedded into the somatosensory cortex, the decoders could use the sensory information they received to mimic the encoders' actions and poke their nose into the right hole to get a drink. They could also transmit the information over the internet in real time, so that the brain activity of an encoder rat in the lab at North Carolina could guide the behaviour of a decoder animal in Brazil.

Even more remarkably, this direct brain-to-brain communication created a feedback loop between the two animals. "The encoder would get a reward if the decoder performed the task correctly," says Nicolelis. "But when the decoder got it wrong, the encoder would move more accurately the next time, so that its brain activity pattern became clearer." It's not clear exactly how the decoder rats integrated natural stimuli with the virtual information received via their implants, and this is something the researchers would like to investigate.

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There's also this - they used transcranial magnetic stimulation in order to "talk back": Researcher controls colleague’s motions in 1st human brain-to-brain interface | UW Today

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNRDc714W5I

University of Washington researchers have performed what they believe is the first noninvasive human-to-human brain interface, with one researcher able to send a brain signal via the Internet to control the hand motions of a fellow researcher.

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard.

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing.

On Aug. 12, Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement.

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens.

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the “fire” button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn’t looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

“It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao said. “This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains.”

The cycle of the experiment. Brain signals from the “Sender” are recorded. When the computer detects imagined hand movements, a “fire” command is transmitted over the Internet to the TMS machine, which causes an upward movement of the right hand of the “Receiver.” This usually results in the “fire” key being hit.
The technologies used by the researchers for recording and stimulating the brain are both well-known. Electroencephalography, or EEG, is routinely used by clinicians and researchers to record brain activity noninvasively from the scalp. Transcranial magnetic stimulation is a noninvasive way of delivering stimulation to the brain to elicit a response. Its effect depends on where the coil is placed; in this case, it was placed directly over the brain region that controls a person’s right hand. By activating these neurons, the stimulation convinced the brain that it needed to move the right hand.

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Considering all this, it seems entirely possible that we'll be able to implant "telepathy-organs" into our brains one day, maybe some sort of bio-chips with wireless connection and an identification number, so that you can dial up people and exchange - language for starters, brain-radio - up to full blown mind-net. But then, wireless might not be such a good idea, for security reasons and also because it would run hot, wouldn't it?

I read a great book lately, "The Bohr Maker" by Linda Nagata, and how they do it there is by growing an "atrium" in their brains with nanobiological means, which is for one thing like a holodeck, and for the other they receive "ghosts" in there. People distil their personal essences into code and go interact with other people in their atriums, to afterwards hopefully return to sender and re-integrate into the main persona. That's a nice idea as well...

Spoiler for review of the Nagata book by Kathleen Ann Goonan, just because I have it at hand...:

Linda Nagata's first novel, THE BOHR MAKER, is an assured, sharp, and fascinating foray into a future where molecular engineering is possible but legally limited. It highlights a battle between those concerned with preserving the Goddess--Gaia; nature--and those who live on the exhilarating edge of innovation, where the definition of what it means to be human is tested and expanded and possibly utterly changed.

The antagonists are evenly matched. Kirstin Adair, a seasoned police chief of immense power, intelligence, and conviction, squares off on the side of Gaia. She is utterly no-nonsense, somewhat sadistic, double-crossing--yet likable somehow for her chutzpah and commitment to creating a bulwark between nature and what she sees as Armageddon, the melding of human and machine intelligence.

Nikko, the creation of the man he calls his father, is programmed to expire very soon when the book opens. He was an experiment, time-limited by law, of a brilliant man, Fox Jiang-Tibayan, who has plenty of other fish to fry; namely, the preservation of Summer House. Summer House is a huge, wondrous, and beautifully depicted organic space habitat created entirely from code, clinging to an astroid. Nikko is hot on the trail of the Bohr Maker, named after its creator, a molecular device of enormous transformational power. With this he hopes to circumvent the legally proscribed death of his body and the wiping out of his code.

"At its essence, the Bohr Maker was a microscopic packet of instructions. But once the instructions were executed, it became a molecular communications and design system that would insinuate itself throughout the body and mind of a single host, resulting in profound physiological change. The host individual would own the talents of an expert in molecular design, along with the physical mechanisms to execute those designs."

Though identity can be easily flung hither and thither via the net and be incorporated in temporary bodies or in waiting nascent clones, death does exist; the law is particularly harsh about various infractions and is empowered to wipe out coded identity, and to seek it out wherever it may be hidden. Molecular engineering is allowable in perfecting human potential--correcting disease and the flaw of old age--but this is the work of legal Dull Intelligences. And, be this as it may, these boons are for the most part available only to Citizens of the Commonwealth. Citizens live primarily in the orbiting Celestial Cities. Unfortunate non-Citizens live in the Spill, on Earth, subsisting on "fluff" and whatever else they can scavenge or steal. They do not live long, and incorporate any stray manifestations of nanotechnology into a superstitious religion. For them, the Imperial highway, a mega-mile-high elevator, is but a myth, or the road their soul will travel when they die.

Thus, when Phousita, a former prostitute kept artificially tiny by illegal means, is suddenly infected with immense power, she believes that she has become a witch. From being an inconsequential everywoman she is hurled into the heart of a conflict she could not have previously dreamed of, and her growing ability to make her own decisions about the use of her powers is one of the most satisfactory aspects of the book.

The search for the Bohr Maker provides a rough-and tumble chase scene through the Spill, space, and Summer House which is tight and sparkling. By the end of it the personalities and values of the main characters have undergone positive changes, for the most part, and the evenly matched tension between natural enemies Nikko and Kirsten is powerfully maintained right up to the final instant.

Nagata has created some science fictional dazzlers in THE BOHR MAKER, in particular Summer House and its fate. And, most importantly, she has brought into sharp relief the difficulty of limiting a viable nanotechnology while at the same time meeting head-on the question of whether or not a viable AI is actually possible. She has given us a "man," Nikko, a completely believable self-aware creature created entirely by another person. Fox and his "son" strongly challenge the creative monopoly of Gaia.

It may be that a hundred years from now such stories will be looked upon as quaint fairy tales from The Time Before It Changed. For now, Nagata makes fine science fiction using the information at hand.

There are a lot of implications, which are less nice than sharing art. It wasn't individualized in the OP's study, how different people represented the same optical info they perceived. So you could probably use this tech to mind-read against the will of the read person, too, in criminal investigations, say - like lie-detectors, just in functioning.
And with talking back convincingly you could override somebody's reality and put them into a virtual torture chamber, but leave no physical traces.
Or right-out zombify and steer people's bodies - weell - lots to think about for future ethics commissions...

"I don't know what happened, I swear! I just suddenly had this powerful impulse to stab my ex husband, I didn't mean to do it!"

Lol conspiracies and world superpowers just got worse!

This is very fascinating! Brain torrents.... It may even be possible to plant memories in someone's head, like they went through an amazing adventure! Or it could be something bad....or, immortality! Copy all personal data and paste them in some other human being, preferably a clone. We would have a chip to continuously save our life progress, and when our cloned body dies, we clone another one and copy paste!!

If nothing else, a feedback loop between two minds might be used to bring a greater sense of intimacy in a romantic relationship.
Perhaps in the future, people will not even consider our comparatively impoverished conception of "love" to be real compared to the brushing of selves that will be possible with better neural interfacing.

oh my gosh, this concept is what I always use to think about, how kool it would be to record dreams. Though dreams are way more complex than an image on a screen in that they also contain feelings and sensations (sort of like hallucigens) that would go well being the dimensions of a movie reproduction. But it's still I think a really interesting concept.

Louai - I think you would make a fine science fiction fan! What about whole books about such stuff? You might be delighted!
Also I'm all for this sort of "soul-sex", Mr. Thinker - hopefully people would find the drive to do anything else at the side...:D
And yepp Deanstar - just a start - but lets hope there are enough scientists with enough money and working hard to bring this to the next levels in our lifetimes!

:yddd:

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Originally Posted by StephL

Louai - I think you would make a fine science fiction fan! What about whole books about such stuff? You might be delighted!
Also I'm all for this sort of "soul-sex", Mr. Thinker - hopefully people would find the drive to do anything else at the side...:D
And yepp Deanstar - just a start - but lets hope there are enough scientists with enough money and working hard to bring this to the next levels in our lifetimes!

:yddd:

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Haha yeah, I love this stuff!

Wait, so it's not possible?
I mean, if we have the mapping of the brain, and we can already create clones or new bodies now, can't we replicate that information? I mean, after all, we do believe in the bundle ego.

Think about it. Sharing full experiences. We can simply put all our life experiences in a new young body, and so we become that person! Seems weird and illogical to have 2 of the same ego, but who said an ego is something special?! In my mind, we don't really 'exist' more than we do operate and evaluate.

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Originally Posted by LouaiB

We can simply put all our life experiences in a new young body, and so we become that person!

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This does not compute…

What makes you 'you' is subjectivity. The fact that you're seeing out from inside… you have complete access to your own conscious thoughts and feelings. You are the one inside that body alone, and everybody and everything else is 'outside'. If you were somehow able to make an exact copy of your mind and implant it into a clone of yourself, it would still be somebody else, just with your memories and personality. You would still be the only 'you', if you get what I mean. How would you transfer that subjectivity into the other body? A copy of your mind is not your mind - hence the argument that if somebody would invent a matter transmitter of some kind like on Star Trek or The Fly it wouldn't actually transfer you to the other compartment - instead what it does is make another person that looks just like you - an exact duplicate, and maybe even somehow duplicates your memories and implants them, and destroys you in your compartment while creating the copy. But how would your sense of self get into the other body? It's sort of like, to use an example from a recent conversation, God allowing Job's entire family to die and then 'making it all ok again' by allowing him to have new kids. See, they're not the same kids - they're different ones.

Have you seen my old thread about secular reincarnation? It goes into a lot of detail about this problem (and how damnably hard it is to even talk about it!!)

EDIT:

How did I not think of this when I wrote that thread??!! The way LaBerge expressed it in ETWOLD is the same way it's expressed in Buddhist beliefs - the awareness is The Observer -that part of you that can watch your thoughts and your feelings, so therefore it is not your thoughts or your feelings. It's something deeper than them.

Weell. I read convincing science fiction where it works and also convincing sf where it doesn't.
As far as I know - the Buddhists claim there is no continuity in consciousness anyway - not even from second to second. How they can then come to the weird idea that after death then suddenly there is continuity in that never-ending discontinuity and with karma-seeds coming into some sort of causal fruition over to your next incarnation - I simply cannot follow that "logic".
Oh dear - I found out lately that my husband is a closet Buddhist, but he likes to ignore this conundrum, can't explain it to me, but is ardently of the opinion, that all my objections wouldn't apply, since I wouldn't understand it properly.
But - he's unable to even express it in words so that it makes sense to his own ears - he just believes, all the rest would be so wise and precious, that I shouldn't think, I can so easily call bullshit on karma and reincarnation. And it would anyways only be peripheral. Weell.
Got something to do much closer to home than I expected - I wonder if I wanted to even know that - I thought he only meditates. Do I write to my own husband now - quoting texts and showing him, that I indeed can? Can call bullshit, I mean. Gosh - I guess, I will sort of have to...:roll::D
I'll report next door then - but we had a discussion yesterday which left me flabbergasted - he didn't shy away from several clear fallacies - even right-out dishonest tactics like changing the goalposts all the time, trying to change the topic and and. Wow! Well - I can't un-know that now...

Ah - and Louai - science fiction is for my understanding not something impossible, but something potentially possible!
But I'm not so sure I believe in your "bundle ego" - where do you have the term from?
Maybe consciousness is not an irreducible phenomenon after all - I guess we really know too little to properly speculate over such things.
Maybe one can "copy" some part of one somewhere else and then somehow re-integrate the experiences made, maybe in an incorporeal form, back into the main persona? Who knows? I don't!

If you had a clone, say, and you, as in your old body, would die in the transfer while your "pattern" is continuously transferred from one substrate to the next - with cables, say - maybe that could work in terms of continuous identity?
I really wouldn't want to place a bet on that matter, if some time-traveller would ask me to.

^And how would the new 'you' know? To her of course it would seem she's the same you, because she would have continuous memories - the early ones would be copies of your memories, but then from the point where the copy comes into existence as a mental being, she would be developing her own memories and adding them to the ones she got from you. But 'you' might just simply cease to exist at that point.

Are you sure you need to kill off your hubby's beliefs? It will undoubtedly go very much like your attempts to talk sense into a certain Creationist who made things very active for a brief while around here (and now it's died down once again). You may think from time to time that you're getting through, only to find out soon that you didn't at all. And it may very well end your marriage or make it unhappy for one or both of you. Challenging someone's core-most beliefs is not a thing to be taken lightly - I've seen it rip apart old friendships even when both parties laughingly assured themselves and everyone else that there was no way that could ever happen - 'after all, we're all adults here, right?' Some things you need to just accept in someone you love - you can't force them to change and trying is a relationship-killer more often than not.

Yeah - I'll see, you're right of course, it might be dangerous in principle.
Right now we're both laughing at it - I showed him my post - now he says, he actually doesn't really believe in reincarnation anyway, and I should go ahead.
But that I should stop, once he would desperately cling on to his meditation mat, chanting and catatonically drawing mandalas on the floor.:cackle:

If he told me he believed in something "spiritual" of any kind - that would make at least internal sense - but he keeps at the same time claiming, he would be a staunch materialist. That's sort of exasperating me - you can't have it both ways, now can you?
Oh well - obviously you can - the mind is a wondrous thing indeed..

Don't worry - but sweet of you to actually do worry - but don't, we're gonna survive that - I can take it, if he stays like that - I love him! And he knows me well enough to not be surprisable by something like this.
But I'll try - seems he's done some reorganizing over the night already.
And he said to greet you sweetly!

I know it's a very complex matter, and I hope this new tech would be able to unwrap more about it, but I still have an opinion.

You see, I think it is possible. The ego behind the thoughts is the consciousness and awareness itself. There isn't really a consciousness behind the consciousness. There is awareness of consciousness, but not a consciousness behind the consciousness. It's just awareness of all the activities.

How I would like to give an example is that, to show you that it's just the regular awareness monitoring everything, is that you strip down all these everything. Consider yourself without sensory input, thoughts , feelings and sense of time... What would your experience be like? Nothing! Your awareness doesn't have anything to cling on! Not even thoughts! There would just be an awareness of nothing. There isn't an ego, it's just awareness, and awateness is a brain function. If there is an ego behind the brain functions, you would have some experience, right? Think about it, all your life it's been nothing but awareness of feelings, emotions, senses and existence (self awareness for the existence bit), and this pretty much fills the whole picture, there isn't more. Further more about being aware of your thoughts: Thoughts are like messages, you are always aware of them, but observing them isn't a different thing; it is being aware of them, but in a mindful way. There are very nice videos about mindfulness in YouTube, it's an amazing skill to be mindful.
Also about being aware of your awareness: It's more like comparison in a sense, or noticing how focused you are, unlike when you aren't being aware of your focusness(not a real word lol); you are aware, observing, how focused you are, unlike when you aren't focused., Or merely aware of the THOUGHT of awareness being active now.

I'm just speculating, of course I really don't know.

I desperately hope we never develop any remotely reliable mind reading technology. The potential for abuse is staggering. How many billions of people live under regimes that would immediately use such technology to further oppress them?