This article is from the WeChat public account: brain polar body (id: unity007), author: sea monster, the original title: "Dream Interaction: Be a Modern Psychic Medium, Consider It?" "Title image from: Movie "Inception"
Sleep accounts for almost one-third of life, and dreaming is an essential physiological activity in sleep.
Many people often see "sleep without dreams" as a sign of a person's mental state, but in fact dreams often occur, but many people completely forget that they have dreamed after waking up.
Studies have shown that dreaming is a physiological mechanism for the brain to self-regulate and repair itself. However, researchers are still expressing their opinions on how dreams are specifically generated and what effects dreams have on the brain and human body. Freud believed that dreams were a reflection of the human subconscious, while Alan Hobson, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, proposed that dreams were simply brain responses to random outputs from the brainstem, a byproduct of the brain's attempt to understand the neural activity that occurs during rem sleep.
Freud tried to decipher people's repressed desires and wishes from the dream, and Hobson reduced the dream to a random firing reaction of neurons, which obviously did not satisfy the researchers who came after. In any case, we must also do something about dreams, such as figuring out the principles of dreaming, and even trying to intervene in dreams, or even like in "Inception" to invade other people's dreams and reverse the consciousness of others.
Recently, the academic journal "Cell" published a paper in Contemporary Biology, and the researchers successfully conducted "real-time dialogues" with some sleeping subjects, including answering questions or performing mathematical operations in their sleep. To put it bluntly, scientists have experimented with what psychic mediums do.
The success of this "dream interaction" experiment means that we have taken a substantial step forward in dream intervention, which will provide the key for human understanding of the relationship between sleep, dreaming, memory, learning and cognition, and open the door to the secrets of dreams.
Lucid dreaming: A "waking sleep" experience
Exploring dreams is not the exclusive preserve of scientists, and many people around me are full of curiosity about dreaming. In addition to the causal quest of many people for the so-called "Zhou Gong Dream Interpretation", some people also have the ambition to copy their complete dreams.
There was once a colleague who was an editor who was very interested in the dreams he had, but he also had the problem of waking up and forgetting. To this end, he thought of a way, that is, to record his sleep, record the dream words he said in his sleep, and then after waking up, he repeatedly listened to the key words in the dream to recall the dream experience. According to him, after a period of recording and practicing, he can really recall most of the contents of the dream, so vivid and vivid that some dream stories can be connected in a few nights, as if he had a second life in sleep.
Of course, his experiments are extremely personal and can be replicated has yet to be verified, but this result shows that if we deliberately practice the brain, it is possible to interfere in our dreams.
Lucid dreaming is such a dreaming state that can be self-trained, that is, the dreamer can keep consciousness awake during sleep, that is, the dreamer knows that he is dreaming. Like many untrained people, they may experience this horrible feeling of "knowing that they are dreaming, but they can't wake up anyway" in their nightmares, while specially trained people can know that they are dreaming in their sleep, but they are very happy to stay in this state and get some new and interesting experiences.
In the 1970s, researchers linked the emergence of lucid dreaming to rapid eye movement sleep (rem), but this finding was not precise enough. Recently, the Sleep Lab of the University of Frankfurt and the University of Bonn jointly monitored the brains of some lucid dream experimenters and found that although lucid dreaming coincides with the rem sleep stage, lucid dreaming also has a significantly different pattern of brain activation, in which the more active dorsolateral prefrontal lobe responsible for logical reasoning begins to participate. It can be said that lucid dreaming is a special mixed state of consciousness that preserves both physiological sleep states and rational consciousness.
This study provides a physiological signaling index of the brain for people to intervene in dreams, and the latest "dream interaction" experiment is based on the recognition of lucid dreams.
Realistic version of Inception: Real-time conversations with dreamers
In order to ensure the rigor and feasibility of this "dream interaction" study, the researchers made the following experimental design:
1. Dream interaction is limited to the stage of "lucid dreaming". To this end, the researchers found 36 subjects, all of whom had different degrees of lucid dreaming experience, and received a period of professional lucid dreaming exercises, and even some belonged to patients with "narcolepsy", often falling asleep briefly and having lucid dreaming. 2. By monitoring their brain waves and eye movements, the researchers ensured that the subjects were in the sleep phase when answering questions. 3. The experiment was conducted simultaneously by four teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States to ask questions to the subjects using different question-and-answer methods, such as playing sounds, flashes of light or finger tapping. The researchers trained subjects in advance to remember to answer questions by turning their eyes or contractions of their facial muscles while dreaming.
After entering the experiment, the sleeping subjects would weave the signals they received into their dreams and answer the questions they thought they had been trained in the same way.
For example, a subject said he was having a party with friends in a dream, but seemed to hear a movie monologue asking if he could Spanish. He moved the muscles on his face to say "no." Another subject said that he saw a flash of light in a dream, he read it to mean 4 plus 0, and then he rolled his eyes to indicate that the answer was "4".
Ultimately, four research teams tried 57 bidirectional interactions during rem sleep in 36 subjects, and when the signal verified that the subjects were in the lucid dreaming phase, the researchers tried to ask a total of 158 questions, of which the subjects were considered to answer correctly 29 times, the wrong answers were 5 times, and the rest were fuzzy and non-response.
In addition, the researchers also tried a two-way interaction experiment during the non-awake REM sleep phase of the subjects, and found that this response signal response was extremely rare (only 1 correct response, 1 wrong response, and the rest were fuzzy and non-responsive).
There were 18.4% correct responses in the lucid dream phase and almost no response in the non-lucid dream rem sleep phase, which both confirmed the possibility of interaction in lucid dreams.
However, we may still be slightly disappointed by the results of the above experiments: this is a little far from the ability of Little Plum to invade other people's dreams, manipulate the dreamer's consciousness, and steal secrets from the mind in "Inception".
However, in the traditional assumption that the brain is "isolated" from the outside world during sleep, and the sleeping person is ignorant of the outside world, this concept has not only been corrected, but also the remarkable ability of the brain to not only receive information from the outside world, but also to understand and respond to problems during sleep.
This is a qualitative leap forward, so the question is, what will this research be used for?
In the lab, the researchers say, the same method can continue to be used to assess the difference in cognitive ability between dreaming and after waking, and to verify the accuracy of people's dream reports after waking up. And once we get out of the lab in the future, we can do much more than that in "dream interaction."
Dream learning, opening Pandora's box again?
We've definitely heard some magical dream stories before. For example, a German chemist, August Stradonitz, learned the structure of the benzene ring from the image of a snake biting its tail in a dream, Mendeleev saw the complete periodic table in a dream, and Pol, the father of quantum mechanics, also saw the structure of atoms in a dream...
These great discoveries that burst out of sleep, while rare, are exciting enough, and dreams are a highly creative state of consciousness for human beings. Even every ordinary person usually has some scenes in their dreams that impress or feel wonderful, some of which we really want to record. But usually the memories we form in our sleep are blurred, and the dream reports we recall when we wake up are often fragmented.
Therefore, for scientists, artists, or people who need to make difficult innovations or major decisions, they can try to use this lucid dream interactive service, from which unique ideas or scenes can be obtained, and the concept of innovation can be entered from the subconscious to the conscious. The "modern psychic medium" who helps record full dream reports could become a whole new profession.
Of course, we also know that dreams are not all creative and pleasant. Often many dreams are filled with absurd scenes, meaningless stitching, and even a lot of negative emotions and past trauma. A series of studies have shown that in those emotionally intense dreams, the amygdala responsible for emotional processing and the hippocampus responsible for long-term memory are also very active, and dreaming is likely to help people regulate emotions through sleep.
Therefore, well-designed dream interaction applications can try to soothe emotions and heal psychological wounds. For example, through wearable devices and smart apps, to help people better enter the lucid dream state, and through appropriate signal prompts to help people perceive the true source of fear, through music, suggestive language to soothe the negative emotions in the dream, so as to provide effective intervention programs for those who have been suffering from nightmares for a long time.
Another application that could gain traction is "dream learning." Now the study also found that the brain in the sleep process is not a simple "offline state", but also the memory of waking time to play back and organize, and dreaming is an important tool to complete this memory task, it can be said that "day and night have dreams" scientific verification.
(After the experimenter fell asleep, the brain was still playing back the memory test game he had just played.)
In the future, if more lasting "dream interaction" can be achieved, then people can actively intervene in dreams according to their personal wishes, such as music practice or motor skill training, and dream practice may help improve skills in reality.
Of course, there are still many problems with the development of dream interactions.
The first issue is the possibility of reality. After our dreams are stimulated by external signals, can we achieve the desired effect, and in the lucid dream stage, can the brain get the results it wants from the dream, rather than meaningless content, thereby increasing people's cognitive burden.
Another problem is potential harm, if excessive intervention in dreams leads to more serious psychological anxiety, and the elimination of negative emotions causes more serious psychological diseases, then such dream interactions are not worth the loss.
Another issue is the necessity of value. Today's human beings are fully developing the efficacy of the brain, because the lack of sleep caused by the information explosion is already a common disease of modern people, so is it necessary for human beings to seize this moment of relaxation of dreaming? If in the future we can really have real-time "dream interaction", such as the ideas and ideas of others implanted in sleep like in "Inception", can we still maintain the independence of our own cognition?
Of course, at the level of our research on dreaming today, the last question still has some "unfounded" implications. But if you really implement the dream interaction method envisaged above, it is equivalent to getting the key to unlock the dream code. And as long as humanity maintains this inquisitive curiosity, we will pick up the key to open the Pandora's box containing the secret of human consciousness.
This article is from the WeChat public account: brain polar body (id: unity007), author: sea monster