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.
To see if this could be done, Wilson and his team trained a group of rats to run through a maze using two distinct audio cues. The rats quickly learned that the tones were helpful; one sound indicated that food could be found by going left, while the other sound indicated that a food reward awaited them on the right. And while the rats were doing this, the neuroscientists were recording their neural activity.
Later, while the rats were sleeping, the researchers once again recorded the neural activity of their brains. Using correlative analysis, Wilson confirmed that the rats were dreaming of their maze navigating exploits from the day before.
But when the researchers played the audio cues from the experiment, they noticed a very interesting thing: the rats would dream about the section of the maze previously associated with the audio cue. The experiment demonstrated that the content of a rat’s dream can be biased by re-activating certain memories while they’re asleep.
Looking ahead, the researchers believe that this simple example of dream engineering could open up the possibility of more extensive control of memory processing during sleep — and even the notion that selected memories could be either enhanced, blocked, or modified. Wilson is also aiming to develop new approaches to learning and behavioral therapy through similar kinds of cognitive manipulation.
Breakthrough Could Enable Others to Watch Your Dreams and Memories (2011)
"The left clip is a segment of the movie that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this movie from brain activity measured using fMRI. The reconstruction was obtained using only each subject’s brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video. (In brief, the algorithm processes each of the 18 million clips through the brain model, and identifies the clips that would have produced brain activity as similar to the measured brain activity as possible. The clips used to fit the model, those used to test the model and those used to reconstruct the stimulus were entirely separate.) Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately. "
PANOPTICON: The documentary about your privacy 2013 05 21 Control on our daily lives increases and privacy is disappearing.
How is this exactly happening and in which way will it effect all our lives? A film about the rise of the surveillance state into your life.
U.S. Dept of Defense googling ’Bishop Richard Williamson Boston Bombings’ 2013 05 21 What does the average American imagine that the "U.S. Department of Defense" does doing their workday? Protect the nation? Conduct military exercises? Invade and subjugate foreign nations who refuse to bow to the international bankers? Perhaps. They are, however, also surfing the internet to snoop on Catholic Bishops who don’t tow the party line. On May 20th, the U.S. Department ...
No Bank Deposits Will Be Spared from Confiscation 2013 05 18
As alert Zero Hedge readers are aware, this week the EURO Politburo is busy debating the dodgy subject of deposit "bail-ins."
The following article very succinctly explains this odious mode of fractal fractional reserve end-game chicanery.
The author encourages all of you to share it with others.
NO BANK DEPOSITS WILL BE SPARED FROM CONFISCATION
By Matthias Chang Esq, futurefastforward.com (with author’s permission)
I challenge ...
Big Bang: Biggest meteorite explosion rocks the Moon 2013 05 17
NASA scientists have recorded the biggest ever meteorite impact on the Moon, with an explosion equal to 5 tons of TNT. The event is part of ‘lunar meteor showers’ observed by astronauts of the Moon exploration program.
The 40-kg meteorite measuring 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide traveling 56,000 mph slammed through the Moon’s surface on March 17, 2013.
The explosion from the ...
Military Says No Presidential Authorization Needed To Quell “Civil Disturbances” 2013 05 17 A recent Department of Defense instruction alters the US code applying to the military’s involvement in domestic law enforcement by allowing US troops to quell “civil disturbances” domestically without any Presidential authorization, greasing the skids for a de facto military coup in America along with the wholesale abolition of Posse Comitatus.
The instruction (embedded at the end of this article), which ...
PANOPTICON: The documentary about your privacy 
U.S. Dept of Defense googling ’Bishop Richard Williamson Boston Bombings’ 
No Bank Deposits Will Be Spared from Confiscation
Big Bang: Biggest meteorite explosion rocks the Moon
Military Says No Presidential Authorization Needed To Quell “Civil Disturbances”