I have been waiting for this day! Here is a fascinating article by Jesus Diaz. I would LOVE to watch my dreams played back on a video some day! Of course, this won’t capture the feelings/emotions, sounds, smells, tastes, etc. that happen in dreams, but the visual component of dreaming is huge. How fun would this be? Read the article to learn more:

Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experimenthttp://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity

Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment
  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.
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.
 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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You can keep up with Jesus Diaz the author of this post, on Twitter or Facebook.

In Dean Radin’s book “Entangled Minds” he writes about many different scientific experiments that confirm the existence of psychic phenomena, also known as ESP or ‘psi’. It seems that people who are very closely bonded together experience more psychic connections with each other than those who are not close or emotionally invested in one another.
Dean cites an experiment involving a functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) scanner.  They found a couple who did well in other psi tests where they were able to send and/or receive information to/from each other with successful results much better than random chance.  One person was put in the fMRI scanner to act as the ‘receiver’ while the other person (the ‘sender’) was exposed to a flickering light. The purpose of the light was to stimulate the brain activity of the ‘sender’, and to see if anything would happen at the same time to the brain of the ‘receiver’.  The receiver’s brain showed a significant increase in activity, with odds against chance of 14,000 to 1!  Not only were they able to show an increase in brain activity at the exact same time, but the fMRI machine was able to show the specific location in the brain where the connection was found. WOW!
Why is this information such a well kept secret? Part of Dean’s plight is about how difficult it is for the existence of psi to be taken seriously, regardless of the scientific evidence confirming it.  I agree, and appreciate Dean’s humor as he comments on the nature of this:
“This discovery is so shocking that it virtually guaranteed no one would hear about it, despite it being published in a medical journal. This is worse than missing a story about aliens landing on the White House lawn. It’s more like spotting an alien shopping in the frozen food section of the local grocery store and no one caring.”
(For all his scientific expertise, the man has a sense of humor, too! Most of his writing is not pondering aliens, I just thought this excerpt was too funny to leave out!)
His other book “The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena” will be released in June, I can’t wait!
http://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Universe-Scientific-Psychic-Phenomena/dp/0061778990/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243404556&sr=1-2

A couple months ago, CBS’s ‘60 minutes’ did a show about a new form of technology called “Thought Identification”. Through the use of a form of MRI scanning called functional MRI (fMRI), scientists can see the parts of the brain that are active when a person thinks about something like an object or a place. This research is being done by cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, and computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell, at Carnegie Mellon University.

They have found that when a person thinks of a noun, it doesn’t just activate one area of the brain. It also activates the way the nouns are associated with verbs, such as see, hear, listen, and taste. Marcel Just explains “Screwdriver isn’t one place in the brain. It’s many places in the brain. When you think of a screwdriver, you think about how you hold it, how you twist it, what it looks like, what you use it for….And we found that we could identify which object they were thinking about from their brain activation patterns.”

Though different people’s brains are not identical, they are close enough that the computer is able to find the commonalities, and then identify which of these a person is thinking of while they are in the fMRI machine. During the segment, they had a producer from the show try out the machine while thinking of 5 objects and 5 places, and the computer was able to correctly identify what she was thinking of 10 out of 10 times!

I find this information fascinating, and I decided to write about it because I feel that it has a direct correlation to dream work. I talk a lot about the importance of individual associations in dream work, and yet I cannot ignore the fact that there are certain Universal Dream Themes that most of us as human beings share (some examples of these include flying, falling, teeth falling out and being naked in public).  While there can be individual variations  (and I always do like to check this), much research has been done by people like Patricia Garfield and Gillian Holloway on Universal Dreams and it is amazing to find that certain dreams often do hold a similar meaning for most people.  The fact that most of us will have similar areas of the brain ‘light up’ when thinking of a certain object or place, and that we can share a common dream and find a common meaning to it, illustrates the idea that we are all sharing this experience of being human and that perhaps we are more connected than not. When I have the chance I like to check with an individual to see if their associations match the universal interpretation, and interestingly enough they usually do indeed apply.

For more information on the show that featured this story, visit:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/31/60minutes/main4694713.shtml