Recording Someone's Dream Isn't As Absurd As It Would Seem

Thanks to movies like Total Recall, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Inception, the idea of playing inside someone’s brain and watching their dreams or altering their memories isn’t completely foreign. That being said, I think it’s safe to assume most of us thought we’d never live in a world in which a machine could tell us what other people are dreaming about. Well, it turns out that might actually be possible.

The above video was put together by the fine folks over at ASAP Science, and it outlines a study scientists recently preformed in which people were hooked up to MRI machines and shown various pictures. Their exact brain responses were then uploaded and stored. Later, they slept in the same machines, and their brain patterns were recorded and a computer used the early information to guess what the person was thinking about. The results weren’t perfect, but they were a hell of a lot closer than random, shot in the dark guesses.

Since the beginning of humanity, our collective understanding of the world has advanced in some truly incredible ways. There’s no way our forefathers could have ever predicted where we’d be at now, and there’s no way we can possibly predict where society will be five thousand years from now. That's why sometimes it's better to just sit back and let our minds continually be blown by forward progress.