MIT researchers are trying to control their dreams using electronics

There is a border between sleep and wakefulness, but it is very fragile. Only now the person has not slept, was thinking about something, was planning his actions for tomorrow - and now he is immersed in the magical world of dreams. Dreams can be good and bad, disturbing or good. It is clear that hardly anyone wants to see nightmares, but many of us would give a lot to learn how to manage dreams.

American scientists from MIT believe that this can be done using scientific methods and modern technology. Moreover, this is not about “tranferfing of reality” or other esoteric fairy tales, but about reality. You can control your dreams with electronic devices. True, so far the authors of the project are only at the very beginning of their journey. One of the initiators is MIT graduate student Adam Horovitz.

Together with his colleagues from the MIT Media Lab, he developed a relatively unusual device called the Dormio . It is activated at the border of the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Dormio helps control microflora, not full-scale dreams. When a person is on the border of wakefulness and sleep, sound and visual hallucinations often occur. This is no longer a reality, but also not a sound sleep. So, scientists from MIT believe that micronous is an ideal object (if it is possible to say so about dreams) to study the possibility of controlling dreams.
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Horowitz and colleagues have already tested their device, realizing that it is possible to increase the duration of the microwheels. In addition, they managed to control the microglobes, people saw at this stage of dreams what the experimenters asked them to think.

At the border of reality and dreams there is a scientific name - hypnagogy. According to Wikipedia , this stage is characterized by the conscious perception of images from the unconscious. It is believed that the mixing of the unconscious with the conscious during the transition from the waking state to sleep is a normal phenomenon that occurs every time a person falls asleep. Under normal conditions, this transition is not remembered, but in some cases a person may notice the border. Most often this happens if a person is constantly focused on himself and his own problems.

At present, this phenomenon is still being studied, and scientists are still arguing about what can be considered a dream. Is this transition considered a dream or a period of wakefulness? The dispute, in general, is similar to the one that occurs with respect to the death of a person. When death comes - when the heart stops beating, when does the brain stop working or when the cells stop dividing?

Whatever the case, hypnagogy should be considered a phenomenon that needs to be studied. Most scholars agree with the opinion of Vladas Noreik from Kebridge. He considers hypnagogia to be the normal state of consciousness of a person who is on the border of dreams and wakefulness. This phenomenon is part of the circadian rhythm.

Hypnagogy raises a number of questions from specialists. One of them is whether a person is more creative in this period, does he have new ideas that can be used in ordinary reality? In addition, another question - why does hypnagogy entail full sleep, what is the mechanism of transition? This stage is interesting because people may not even be aware of going to sleep. Some of us at this stage quite reasonably answer questions, although then they may not remember at all that they were asked about something. If you bring a person out of hypnagogy into a state of wakefulness, return to reality, most will remember hallucinations and even be able to describe them.


This is what Dormio created by MIT specialists looks like.

Hypnagogia may have donated a number of inventions and works of art to humanity. Thomas Edison, Alan Po, Nabokov, Shelley, Albert Einstein, Salvador Dali, Richard Wagner, Mendeleev said that many ideas came to them just on the verge of sleep and wakefulness. Perhaps, when some boundaries of consciousness are erased and a person begins to receive information from the subconscious, unconscious, this leads to the emergence of new ideas.

Some inventors even specially tried to enter the state of hypnagogy, drawing on ideas from the masses of the unconscious. An example is Thomas Edison, who fell asleep with bearings in his hands. When the moment of transition from wakefulness to sleep began, the hands relaxed, the bearings fell to the floor and woke him. During the "micron" Edison saw many ideas, strange hallucinations, which he remembered and then reproduced in reality.

According to Horowitz, he read about famous people, scientists, writers, musicians. Some of them colorfully described the hypnagogy stage. However, so far no one has invented a better idea than holding steel bearings in their hands. But this is not at all, because hypnagogy can be made to work in the interests of the person and with the help of more modern methods.

So what is Dormio?

So, Dormio, the device mentioned above, just serves to improve the efficiency of the Edison technique (not only he used something like that, by the way).

The system already had two prototypes, now the developers have begun to create a new, third version. The scheme of work is as follows. The subject puts gloves on his hands and squeezes his hands into fists, which puts pressure on the sensor placed on the glove. In addition, part of the Dormio is an electroencephalograph , whose sensors record the electrical activity of the brain. As soon as the arms and the encephalograph record the relaxation of the muscles and changes in the brain's electrical activity, a signal is given to the standing Jibo robot to utter a prepared phrase, which, even if the person is not aware of it, is accepted by the brain. Processing the information received, the brain begins to work in the direction that a person needs. Well, for example, there is an idea for scientific work.

So far, the “sleep machine” in question is very imperfect. In addition, it consists of elements that are quite expensive. The same encephalograph is very complicated for the uninitiated user, and only a good specialist can decipher the signals. In addition, there are only two sensor positions on gloves - “on” and “off”. In fact, all this is not very different from the very metal balls that Edison used.



The Dormio developers say that in the third version of the system, it will be able to track the movement of the eyelids and eyeballs. The main goal is to make the device as comfortable and non-invasive as possible, so to speak. The system has already been tested on six volunteers from MIT. The study participants came to the laboratory every evening after sunset and lay down on the couch to sleep. As soon as they fell asleep, Jibo uttered a phrase like "you need to think about a rabbit" or "think about a fork." As soon as Dormio fixed the transition to sleep, the robot uttered another phrase - “you fall asleep”.

Thus, the developers tried to prevent the person from entering a deep sleep. Instead, the volunteer was between sleep and reality, observing all the manifestations of hypnagogy, including sound and video hallucinations. The robot also asked what the volunteers saw in this state and recorded their answers.

As it turned out, all the volunteers saw at this stage exactly what the robot asked them to think. This means that Dormio works very well. The system, according to the developers, should stimulate a person to draw ideas from the subconscious, and more effectively than our ancestors did. For example, during the experiments, volunteers were asked to come up with an alternative way of working with the objects mentioned above - with the same rabbit or fork.



And many coped with this task, and after returning to wakefulness, the subjects could recall and write down all (or almost all) that they had seen and heard during the transition to sleep. Four volunteers reported that the ideas they received during the hypnagogy period were truly creative.

“Ideas did not come from me, they themselves came to my head. I felt that, as it were, I was in non-existence, in a space where all these ideas exist, and it seemed to me very rational that they are in this place, ”one of the volunteers commented on the tests.

Of course, a fork or a rabbit is not exactly what scientists usually think about. Creative ideas would be great to get from nowhere, but if it comes to something more complicated than a fork, then problems may arise. On the other hand, if a person is constantly thinking about any technological issue (a machine node or a piece of code), then perhaps a system like Dormio can help him.

In order for all this to work in a mode close to ideal, it is necessary that the Dormio or a system similar to it be less visible to the carrier. As mentioned above, now the developers are at the stage of creating the third version of the device.

At the same time, scientists are studying the mechanisms of hypnagogy in order to get a clearer picture of the essence of the phenomenon. This is a complex phenomenon, but if you try to understand everything in detail, humanity will be able to get an interesting tool for generating ideas of various kinds. Much is already known about hypnagogy as about the process, but not so much is known about the mechanism of the emergence of the process, and now experts are trying to fill this gap in scientific knowledge.

In 2015, the authors of the project had a volunteer, a literature professor. And so he described hypnagogy, the very border of wakefulness and sleep, as "intense linguistic intrusions, including words from foreign languages." In other words, for each person, his own hypnagogy stage is unique. Someone will see hallucinations in the form of technology, someone - in the form of letters and words. Well, someone subconscious will present the image of the planet or some animal.

Anyway, hypnagogy is a very interesting phenomenon, and its study should be continued. And this is especially important in the light of the opportunity to get something useful - ideas, interesting thoughts, even if they are fancy. True, before the practical use of hypnagogy will take more than one and not two years, it will take a long time to learn all this.