德科学家实现用大脑扫描仪“读梦”

Most of us remember only a tiny fraction of our dreams - but that could soon change.

Scientists predict that we could soon use computers to “see” what we have dreamed about - and perhaps even record dreams to watch the next day.

Psychiatrists at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany think have already demonstrated that brain scanners can see into the dreams of “lucid dreamers” - people who can control their dreams.

It means that recent breakthroughs in “reading” the thoughts of waking subjects using brain monitors could apply to dreamers too.

The Planck institute scientists proved that scans of “lucid dreamers” dreams looked the same as scans of their brain when they do the same thing while conscious.

The research, published in Current Biology, could be used with recently demonstrated “reconstruction” technology to create moving images of people's dreams.

The lucid dreamers agreed to move their eyes and hands from side to side to show the researchers the moments they “controlled” their dreams to dream about clutching a hand.

The scientists monitored the dreamers with both magnetic resonance imaging and near-infrared spectroscopy to see patterns of heat in their subject's heads, which gives a picture of brain activity.

The dreamers did not clench their hands while they dreamt - but the scans of their brains showed identical brain activity when they clenched a real hand, and when they clenched a dream hand.

The discovery paves the way to use “reconstruction” technology to build images of people's dreams.

So far, the Planck institute scientists have reconstructed just two dreams. The number of scanners, and the difficulty of controlling dreams, has meant that the experiment was extremely difficult.