The Secret Life of the Mind by Mariano Sigman

Author:Mariano Sigman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology / Cognitive Neuroscience & Cognitive Neuropsychology, Science / Life Sciences / Neuroscience, Medical / Neuroscience
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

Deciphering dreams

We have all had the experience of waking up thinking that we were only asleep for a few seconds, and actually hours have passed. Or the opposite, a few seconds of sleep sometimes seem to have lasted an eternity. As we sleep, time flows in an odd way. In fact, it’s possible that the dream itself was just the illusion of a story constructed as we woke up.

Today we are able to resolve this mystery by observing traces of thought in the brain in real time. Just as we can investigate the thought processes of vegetative patients and babies, and subliminal processing based on cerebral activity, we can use similar tools to decipher our thoughts during dreams.

One way of decoding thought based on cerebral activity is dividing the visual cortex into a grid, as if each cell were a pixel in the sensor of a digital camera. Based on that we can reconstruct what is in the mind in the form of images or videos. Using this technique, Jack Gallant was able to re-create a strikingly clear film, by observing only the brain activity of the person watching the film.

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