Scientists have just found humans to solve good problems while dreaming

Karen Konkoly was asleep at Shangri-La, a music festival in Minnesota. She had a beautiful dream until the sound of her boyfriend’s snoring filled their tent. But she did not wake up. Instead, when the snoring went into her sleep, Konkoly realized she was dreaming. As she recognized that all the dream around her was a deception, the sights of the dream began to spread. She jokingly describes the feeling, “Snoring was the next level of truth. All I could see was “more real” than the dream. ”

It is called a ragged dream: the dream becomes a realization that she is dreaming without waking up. Konkoly was very interesting. “Our minds and what we focus on to create things,” she says. “I wanted to find out how and why new information is coming in from countries that are in the dark. ”Receiving information from the waking world while dreaming is just like the kind of situation Konkoly, Ph.D. student at Northwestern, to understand.

Now, Konkoly is the first author of a new study in Conventional biology, in which researchers from four different countries found a way to talk to people who are sleeping and dreaming in real time. Not only did the researchers get people to answer their questions while dreaming, they also had people solve mathematical problems correctly. The results were so interesting, the study is the subject of a documentary by PBS’s Nova.

Scientists have never been able to interpret dreams

Dreams can be miraculous, strange or scary. Some dreams are so vivid that the experience helps us understand why our ancestors believed that they were prophetic messages from the gods. And while we know more than we did about dreaming, scientists have not yet figured out exactly what dreaming is or why they are.

Dreamers experience one truth while the waking world experiences another, raising questions about the nature of human consciousness itself. But dreams have been very difficult to study. One reason for this is that as soon as we wake up, our dreams start to fade. That means a lack of research based on our memory of our dreams.

“Dreams take us to a different reality, a false world that feels as real as any awakening experience,” Konkoly and her co-authors write. But what if scientists could communicate with a dream in real time?

“Our experimental goal is similar to finding a way to talk to an astronaut who is on another world, but in this case, the world is designed entirely based on memories stored in the brain. , “the researchers write.

The researchers invoke two-way communication during dreams ’interactive dream. ‘Now that they have shown that it can happen, they hope to learn more about people’s dreams as they happen.

Interactive dream

Most people need to wake up to answer questions properly. But most people are also not conscious when they are dreaming. The researchers felt that lucid dreaming provided a unique opportunity. Perhaps their ability to be conscious while dreaming could allow them to interact.

The team recruited a group of active ragsmakers for the study. But they also hired beginners and then trained them to dream rags. In addition, one participant suffered from narcolepsy, “a brain disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, short REM periods, and frequent vivid dreaming. ”

Four independent laboratories in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA collaborated on a study, each using their own methods. But the four laboratories found evidence of two-way communication through naps during the day or through sleep during the night in the three groups of participants.

“We put the results together because we felt that the combination of results from four laboratories using different approaches certainly testifies to the reality of this phenomenon of two-way communication,” he said. Konkoly. “In this way, we see that different methods can be used to communicate. “

During the various trials, the participants were examined with polysomnograms to confirm that they were in REM sleep. REM stands for fast eye movement sleep, which is when lucid dreaming can occur.

Study participants were taught to tell researchers when they entered a ragged dream with a series of quick eye movements next to it. Once they had done so, the researchers used beeps or lights to communicate with them.

In this discovery from Konkoly ‘s lab, the sleeper indicates that they are awake with eye periods and then solves a mathematical problem correctly.

Now that the team has shown that two-way communication during dreams is a reality, we may finally have a chance to understand what a dream is. The researchers are working to expand and refresh two-way communication with sleepers to make more complex conversations possible one day.

Sleep on it

It is common practice to tell someone with a big forward decision to ‘sleep on.’ But we’re not just saying that because it takes people time. We say it because so many of us have come to us with an answer or a solution in a dream. The researchers hope their methods could help people use their dreams to solve problems.

While we wait for them to find out, the grad students in the US lab (at Northwestern) have given us a new activity to try at home. They developed a smartphone app that teaches people to achieve logging through their dreams. The lucid app, available for Android phones, can be downloaded from the Google Play store.

Covid-19 still keeps us at home. With anything nearly as binge-worthy as the Tiger King to watch, training our roommates and lovers to do math while they sleep is perhaps the next big thing.