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ANDREW TAYLOR, VIA EMAIL HOW CLOSE ARE WE TO BEING ABLE TO RECORD OUR DREAMS?
Artificial intelligence (AI) that works with mind-reading machines is the type of technology that we'll need to reproduce what we experience in our dreams. A well-publicised Japanese research study demonstrated the beginnings of the method in 2023: researchers recorded the brain activity of sleeping participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners and then used machine learning to classify perceived objects, such as a key, a person or a chair from the activity. However, the study was focused on sleep onset: the first two stages of sleep during which we experience visual imagery (hallucinations) and didn't look at dreams at all. They chose this approach so the participants could wake up and quickly describe what they saw.
To reproduce our dreams, we need a lot of detailed fMRI data from dreaming volunteers with which to train a large AI. The volunteers need to be very good at remembering their dreams in a lot of detail so that we'll know how accurate any prediction may be. This is likely to be the most difficult part about recording dreams and it's unclear how this kind of data can be generated reliably.
But we already have a head start in a related area: there have been research studies that have produced huge datasets of fMRI brain activity while conscious participants watch thousands of videos, listen to spoken-word recordings and read text. Using AIs trained on these datasets we can already predict what a waking person may be watching or reading.
If we assume that, in a few years, we'll have sufficient data to make such an AI and we have portable fMRI machines that