What kind of dreams are you doing? Analyzing the brain activity during sleeping and successfully decoding with high accuracy

ByVisual Artist Frank Bonilla

The research team of the Neuroinformatics laboratory of the International Telecommunications Research Institute of Advanced Media Technology (ATR) clarified what kind of dream sleeping people are dreaming and the contents can be deciphered by analysis of brain activity I made it.

Succeeded in deciphering the contents of the dream seen from the pattern of brain activity during sleep
(PDF file)http://www.atr.jp/topics/press_pdf/20130405_Science_130405.pdf


Neural Decoding of Visual Imagery During Sleep
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/04/03/science.1234330


Contents of dreams succeeded in decoding with high precision NHK News
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20130405/k10013690171000.html


This research was carried out by Yoshiyuki Horikawa, Researcher Tomoki Horikawa, Researcher Tamaki Tamaki, Researcher Yoichi Miyawaki, Manager of Yasuyasu Kamiya, at the ATR Brain Information Institute / Neuroinformatics Laboratory, and published the local time April 4Science ExpressIt is published in.

In the study, three electroencephalographs were attached to three subjectsFMRIHave them sleep in the device, measure the brain activity in real time and judge sleep state. I repeated the task of waking up the subject at the timing when the sleep brain wave pattern that is known to be related to the state of dreaming and asking the subject to report the contents of the dream I had been seeing in the words, and for each subject Acquired about 200 dream report data. A pattern recognition algorithm that predicts whether the main object categories (about 20 categories such as "book" and "car") are included in the contents is extracted by extracting the words that are reported and analyzing using the language database (Decoder) has been built.

It is a figure outlining the experiment. When I realize that "I am dreaming", wake up the subject and report the contents in about 30 seconds, when I finish sleeping, I wake up again and wake up again if I dream ....


By analyzing brain activity during sleep using this decoder, we succeeded in deciphering the information of object categories appearing in dreams.

An example of a trial pattern of a subject. At this time, subjects are dreaming of letters appearing, and even in the decoder, the score that the category of brain activity is "character (character)" is high.


For prediction of dream contents, it turned out that patterns of brain parts that are active when looking at images are effective, and even when dreaming, common brain activity patterns are generated. Although it is not known whether image information such as "color" or "shape" in a dream can be decoded for now, it is verified whether it is possible to decode more various dream contents by applying / developing approach in the future It is planned to do.

Also, by using this method not only for dream contents but also for deciphering imagination and hallucinations,Brain-machine interfaceIt is expected to contribute to the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders, application to psychological state visualization.