8 Advancements In Brain Science Straight Out of Science Fiction

Crazy about neuroscience-related research articles? Probably not. While the work of neuroscientists is important, it isn’t typically flashy. The research tends to be obscure and tedious, and the information discovered only makes an incremental contribution to our knowledge about how the brain functions. However, occasionally, these experiments yield significant breakthroughs that resemble scenes from a science fiction film. Here are 8 recent mind-blowing discoveries in the world of neuroscience that could one day be gamechangers. 

8. Recording Dreams

Who among us hasn’t wished we could record our dreams and then watch them later, like you would a movie? Researchers in Kyoto, Japan, have demonstrated that this might very well become a reality in the not-too-distant future. The experience involved three participants sleeping inside an MRI scanner so that their brain activity could be recorded. They were then awakened, and what they saw in their dreams was documented. They each did this 200 times. The second stage involved isolating the 20 most commonly “seen” objects and then having the participants look at photos of the objects, with their responses measured to establish a correlation. The photos and corresponding MRI scans were then fed into a learning algorithm. During the third and final stage, the participants slept in the MRI scanner, their brain activity was being recorded, and the smart algorithm began generating a string of images that were able to match what the participants were dreaming about 60 percent of the time. There’s obviously still a long way to go before we can sit down with a tub of popcorn and watch a video of what we dreamed about last night, but it’s nonetheless an impressive start.