Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Hey, I haven't told you a bedtime tech ghost story for a long time.

After all, what story could be more frightening than the start of 2020? ┓ ('∀') ┏

However, thanks to the efforts of scientists day and night, the public still saw an invention that "although I don't understand it, I think it's very powerful." That's the newly developed wearable odor diffuser BioEssence from the MIT Dream Lab.

Once put on, the device monitors your heart rate and brain waves and tracks your sleep stage. Once the N3 stage associated with the memory area is reached, the preset smell will be released.

Because the sense of smell is connected to the brain areas of memory and emotion (the amygdala and the hippocampus), "dream transformation" can be achieved. Have a nightmare, give you some fragrance and calm; smell the fragrance of your first love, instantly dream back to the campus of youth.

Of course, like all "science and technology ghost stories", this device is also "ideal plump, realistic bone feeling", and faces many tests such as technological maturity, effectiveness, manufacturing, social ethics and so on.

So we don't talk too much about the significance of this "dream intrusion" hardware itself. It is why scientists are so obsessed with the "dream" interest, and its real scientific progress, but can have a big impact on our lives.

Do you know how hard scientists are trying to control dreams?

Human beings love to dream, but not everyone can dream, interpret and change dreams like scholars.

Through the ages, how many researchers have been poor for the illusory "dream", it is difficult to exhaust them one by one. However, it is clear that everyone is interested in controlling dreams.

Some try to invade dreams with hypnotherapy.

In film and television works such as Inception, the "key" to dream is to make the patient in a sleep-like state through hypnosis with the help of some suggestive objects or language.

In the hypnotic state, the human cerebral cortex is highly inhibited, and the ability to distinguish new stimuli is greatly reduced. Therefore, the doctor can intervene in the patient's "dream" and clearly point out to him that the symptoms will disappear with positive and affirmative language, or conduct psychoanalysis to find out the psychological root cause of the disease.

In fact, hypnotherapy has a history of more than 200 years since Mesmer, E. A, an Austrian doctor, used hypnosis and used it in medical treatment in 1775. Freud, Jung, Pavlov and other scholars have also done a lot of research on the phenomenon of hypnosis.

Some use social science methods to "teach people to dream".

For example, Stephen LaBerge, PhD in psychology at Stanford University and the father of modern lucid dreams in the West, is trying to persuade brain cells to return to their dreams.

In 1913, Dutch doctor Frederick Van Eeden coined the term "lucid dream", in which dreamers have the ability to think and remember when they are awake, but know that they are in a dream.

But how do you control yourself from having a "lucid dream"? in the late 1970s, Stephen Lahberg made this his doctoral project. For the first time, he used scientific research to reveal the relationship between lucid dreams and rapid eye movement sleep (REM).

On the website of the lucid Dream Institute, where LaBerge works, there are many ways to improve the chances of lucid dreams. For example, keeping a dream diary, using the characters or buildings in the dream as clues, taking segmented sleep, and so on.

In addition, he has developed a product called NovaDreamer that flashes red when people enter REM sleep, prompting people to enter lucid dreams.

In recent years, with the development of brain neuroscience, some hardware that can control dreams has been released to the consumer market.

Bitbanger Labs, a company, raised money on the fundraising website Kickstarter to invent sleep masks that can invade the human brain through dreams.

According to the description on the website, there are six red LED lights inside the mask, which is so dim that it does not wake the sleeper, but enough for the brain to recognize their existence. Users can automatically set LED lights to produce a specific sequence.

When the user enters the REM sleep phase (usually 4 to 5 hours later), the device lights up red. When users are playing golf in their dreams, you can see a flashing red light in the distance, reminding you that you are dreaming.

Stanford's Dream Lab also launched an early wearable device, the Dormio, that can "control dreams."

It will wrap around the user's wrists and fingers, use built-in sensors to track muscle, heart rate, skin and other states, and once it is judged to be in an active "hypnotic state", it will play the user's pre-recorded audio to determine what will happen in the dream.

The team once played "tiger" for 50 experimenters, and then they actually dreamt about tigers.

It can be said that scientists in order to study the true meaning of dreams, and try to change it, really at all costs, some even for decades of research. Unfortunately, so far, there is no clear evidence that people can really control dreams. Isn't it kind of sad?

Inception? Really think too much.

Not to mention the degree of influence of Inception, even to explain and reproduce dreams, the current technical means are difficult to "point where to play." Why do you say that?

First of all, at present, human beings still have a very superficial understanding of dreams, and they have not even found the direct and inevitable relationship between dream content and external stimuli, let alone precise control.

For example, social philosophies (From had a sociological background before he became a psychotherapist) see dreams as an expression of human unreasonable needs and reshaping social relations. For example, a beggar dreams that he has eaten the whole table, or a little girl sees a warm fire and turkey in her dream, which emphasizes the symbolic meaning of the dream, focusing on the dialectical interpretation of the dream rather than scientific proof. In ancient China, it was also believed that "if you lie in your heart, you will dream." Zhu Xi, a scholar in the Southern Song Dynasty, also said, "the dreamer, the heart moves in sleep," that is, the mental activity stimulated by various factors.

Until the end of the 19th century, Freud put forward psychoanalysis and began to do a lot of empirical research on dreams, which greatly promoted human understanding of dreams and made the interpretation of dreams enter the field of science. Among them, there are many branches, which are repeatedly falsifying, confronting and seeking the truth. For example, Freud believes that dreams reflect people's repressed desires and emotions, and are the expression of the subconscious. Jung, his student, believes that the function of dreams is compensation, in which human beings experience life that they cannot experience in order to maintain psychological balance. Adler, another student, believes that dreams are a deceptive way to solve problems. If a person faces problems in life bravely, he seldom needs to dream.

Advances in brain neuroscience, especially magnetic resonance imaging and neuroimaging technology, provide new evidence to better describe the activated areas of the brain during sleep, allowing people to understand dreams to a higher level. Based on longitudinal laboratory research, Fox Foulkes puts forward the theory of cognitive development of dreaming, which holds that dreams are a product of human cognitive and visual spatial ability. once people reach a certain stage of development (8-9 years old), dreams occur naturally.

Alan Hobson, a professor at Harvard University, also believes that dreams are meaningless, just a by-product of the brain's nocturnal operation, an illusion produced by the brain when it processes random impulses of sensory input.

Ben Hu also began to dream about running and jumping platform frequently when he was in primary school, and he was deceived by his parents because he was tall, did readers have a similar experience?

Of course, there are many dream theories based on brain neuroscience. Krek's reverse Learning Theory (reverse learning theory), for example, holds that dreams are regular cleaning systems of memory, leaving room for more important memories in order to remove unimportant and unpopular connections from the cortical network. This theory also affects educational disciplines, developing "temporary memory" and "long-term memory", and sleep (dreaming) has become an effective way to guide students to recite (transfer temporary knowledge to long-term storage areas).

Of course, artificial intelligence cannot be absent. In 2018, researchers at the University of California's Gallant Lab asked AI to become a dream interpreter, using algorithms to process brain activity to form recognizable images, allowing participants to watch movie trailers and actively think about what they were watching, thereby reproducing blurred images of the trailers. They believe that if the same technology is applied to dreams, the visual effects associated with dreams can be seen.

It is obvious that no science can provide reliable support for the feasibility of transforming dreams. The philosophical school is too idealistic, and the functional interpretation of dreams is almost speculative, so it is difficult to be verified effectively.

Psychoanalysts can't stand the test of experiments. Neuroscientist Ismet Karakan asked a group of young men to stop "porn" in 1970 to see if their indescribable dreams would increase, but none at all. In fact, hypnotherapy does not always achieve good results.

Even those involved in brain science experiments, such as Stanford Dream Lab, made a subconscious dream machine that proved not to be able to manipulate dreams effectively. According to common sense, the discovery of rebuilding a person's mind in the form of high-resolution video, which is enough to win the "Turing Prize" and the Nobel Prize, will not be easily reaped by mankind.

In addition to the limitations of the study itself, the influence of experimental ethics also makes a lot of dream research difficult.

Because in some dream experiments, some studies need to have an impact on neurotransmitters and need to be carried out before surgery in patients with epilepsy, it is often difficult to get the consent of the patients or their families. Therefore, most of the subjects were animals, or patients with mental illness / Parkinson's disease, or patients with brain injury. As a result, experimental data based on health workers cannot be obtained and analyzed.

In addition, it is necessary to carry out cross-border research on whether there are differences in brain activity during dreaming among different social cultures and races, and there are also great difficulties in operation. This makes it difficult to obtain universal evidence in the functional study of dreams.

At least for now, there is no sign of loosening of the above factors, so dreams for human beings are still in the mirror for a long time.

Do it knowing you can't do it: where does the researchers' obsession with dreams come from?

At present, it seems that there are three main considerations that promote the dream of science:

The first is to help deal with psychological problems. Although the mechanism and principle of dreams are not completely clear, the influence of dreams on anthropological mental state has been confirmed by data. Through hypnosis and suggestion, to ease people's tension in real work life, such as anxiety, depression, restlessness, etc., has been successful in the past decade. Experiments show that giving positive signals in dreams can enable subjects to improve their cognition of corresponding stress factors and re-adapt to society. The Dream Lab team, for example, says BioEssence is designed to cure, such as repairing symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

This principle is also easy to understand, after all, who has a good dream, wake up will not be full of state? Tonight I dream of Wu Lei, Zhu Yilong and Peng Yuyan, I beg you! [crazy hint]

The second is the utilitarian purpose of obtaining some inspiration. There are also researchers who sincerely believe that people can gain something from dreams to guide real life. In fact, there are many widely spread stories, such as Einstein and Feynman were inspired in lucid dreams; the poet Lu you kept thinking about dreams and wrote, "knowing is a dream in a dream, but afraid of swallow words to sleep." and director Nolan was inspired in lucid dreams to create an eye-popping "Inception." Some people even think that dreaming can provide inspiration for themselves to invent and create better. Although it is difficult to tell the truth from the false, it does not affect people's fantasy that they can improve themselves and reap real happiness in their lives.

The third is the commercial value of real gold and silver. People's curiosity and yearning for dreams have also made "dreaming" a good business. Whether it is the incense of metaphysics, voice, or cyberpunk dream machines, sleep goggles, can create a lot of revenue. For example, the Remee goggles mentioned earlier can be sold for up to $95 and can be customized.

Standing today, it is difficult for us to say with certainty whether the desire of human beings to manipulate dreams is a "dream of Zhuangsheng." But to be sure, we can use wearable devices to monitor snoring, grinding teeth, tossing and turning to sleep, so that we can sleep better. But there is no equipment that allows people to taste the sweetness of "dreams" from science and technology.

Human beings who study dreams may never be able to reach that farther world, just to better understand human nature itself. Dear you, what kind of dream do you want to have?

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