Neuroscientists successfully control the dreams of rats. Could humans be next?

An interesting if slightly creepy piece. Scientists now have the power to look into rat's brains and "confirm" what they are dreaming about...and to make changes.

Think of the implications for humans...ranging from subliminal mind control, behavior control, and propaganda on the dark end of the spectrum to "customized dreaming" and virtual-reality style entertainment. Such fantasies are still years away, if even possible at all...but big things always begin with small experiments.

Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat’s dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day’s events, namely running through a maze (what else). The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep — but it also holds potential for the prospect of “dream engineering.”

Working at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, neuroscientist Matt Wilson was able to accomplish this feat by exploiting the way the brain’s hippocampus encodes self-experienced events into memory. Scientists know that our hippocampus is busy at work replaying a number of the day’s events while we sleep — a process that’s crucial for memory consolidation. But what they did not know was whether or not these “replays” could be influenced by environmental cues.

More at Source (i09)

S&F for this wonderful find OP. This thread will grow huge, trust me. If this technology actually gives us virtual reality sometime in the future, we'll be living in a World where all humans will have little connection with one, if any at all. I really do believe misuse of technology will be Humanity's biggest downfall.

Why would the average human want this?
I could understand those who are mentally disturbed by nightmares of past heartache being freed from that pain. However, this frightens me. It is much too close to achieving mind control.

Originally posted by headorheart
Why would the average human want this?
I could understand those who are mentally disturbed by nightmares of past heartache being freed from that pain. However, this frightens me. It is much too close to achieving mind control.

If it means participating in orgy dreams every night, sign me up, feed me through a tube and don't wake me.

Since it's impossible to "see" what anyone dreams, I wish the article would have been more specific about the limits of neuro-science, instead of just getting kids to think the movie, "Inception", is anything but a fantasy. Using audio, or electric pulse signals on animal's brains for experiments in behavioral control is nothing new. In my view it's unnecessary cruelty.

So yes, human volunteers should be next.

Originally posted by solarstorm

Originally posted by headorheart
Why would the average human want this?
I could understand those who are mentally disturbed by nightmares of past heartache being freed from that pain. However, this frightens me. It is much too close to achieving mind control.

If it means participating in orgy dreams every night, sign me up.

Well played.

Total recall here we come

The mechanism they have utilized in this study seems quite similar to human practices to initiate lucid dreaming, where we hear a sound or see a sight that makes us realize we are having a dream.

reply to post by silent thunder


yes,my ex controlled my dream and look how it turned out..

Originally posted by trysts
Since it's impossible to "see" what anyone dreams, I wish the article would have been more specific about the limits of neuro-science, instead of just getting kids to think the movie, "Inception", is anything but a fantasy. Using audio, or electric pulse signals on animal's brains for experiments in behavioral control is nothing new. In my view it's unnecessary cruelty.

So yes, human volunteers should be next.

Inception isn't complete fantasy. Lots of us know that. They have trained agents in many things.

However this obviously relating to use of HAARP, nano technology and/or implants.

And no one has the right to control dreams.

newscenter.berkeley.edu...

They claim their decades away from detailing this. Well, sorry, the black sciences are quite a bit more ahead of ours than that, so they have this developed already.

Originally posted by Unity_99

Originally posted by trysts
Since it's impossible to "see" what anyone dreams, I wish the article would have been more specific about the limits of neuro-science, instead of just getting kids to think the movie, "Inception", is anything but a fantasy. Using audio, or electric pulse signals on animal's brains for experiments in behavioral control is nothing new. In my view it's unnecessary cruelty.

So yes, human volunteers should be next.

Inception isn't complete fantasy. Lots of us know that. They have trained agents in many things.

However this obviously relating to use of HAARP, nano technology and/or implants.

And no one has the right to control dreams.

I've read you lately, Unity_99. You write some very bizarre things. We think VERY differently!

In researching the Aviary recently, I came across some papers from the neurophysiology-intelligence field that show far they've coming in actually "reading" minds.

They government is already/testing using some technology to read, from a distance, the psychological state of people in areas where terroism might occur it appears.

There are many issues to still be straddled but the implications are scary indeed at times.

One country is using a non-invasive lie detector system and have even convicted at least one person using it.

It's effectiveness is questioned--as dang well it should be--but the way all this is headed, as the technologies advance as they always do, is both mind-boggling and frightening.

These included the nature of psychological states compared to “mind reading,” the nature of neurophysiological and neural activity, and barriers to identification of mental states and intentions.

This complex set of interrelated factors must be understood and accounted for to detect a psychological state—that is, to “read” a mind—using any technology.

Inexpensive, noninvasive endocrine assays (Dickerson and Kemeny, 2004) and noninvasive, high-density electroencephalographic and functional brain imaging technology with high spatial and temporal resolution of brain processes have advanced rapidly.

www.nap.edu...

Several of the cognitive science applications that have the most enormous ethical implication (as described by Huang and Kosal) contain advances that are being made even faster than publicly thought. These advances do not include lie detection technology, whose potential to invade the privacy of individuals is an unrealistic scientific possibility (I'm waiting for a theory of mind to be developed first!). They do include an approach to near-real-time, multimodal cognitive measurements to "watch people think" while under stress (an achievable goal scientifically) not under duress (an unachievable goal scientifically).

www.thebulletin.org...

Great thread.S&F. I'll be back with some more stuff when I dig it back up.