Video dream recorder

I don’t know if you can recall your dreams, but I can’t. It’s not that what I dream about is all good and worth remembering, but on occasions, I have some pretty pleasant dreams that I’d like to revisit the next day and this was basically impossible for me. I was told this would change with Dr. Chiaki Yatsuda, a Japanese scientist who has been involved in a major artificial intelligent project and has close ties with Marcel Just and Tom Mitchell from Canergie Mellon University. Both are both working on a stunning mind reading project by observing the thinking brain under an MRI machine. Yatsuda’s background and previous work has been focused on “imaging” thoughts in the sense that he can turn specific brain waves into real images. For instance, if the brain sees a wristwatch, his software will translate the impulses collected into the generic image of a watch. If it sees a “Movado” watch, it will then display a typical representation of that brand; add the model name and you get the real thing, and so on. The real challenge of course is to build a gigantic data base of images for every object, every situation and every feeling, which is what Dr. Yatsuda has been working for years. Another condition is that it’s utterly impractical to have a person dream inside an MRI machine. Instead, you need a silent and comfortable environment for harvesting dreams and turning them into images. This brings us to the special helmet that Yatsuda and his team have developed. This device -just like a silent MRI machine can observe brain activity, will simultaneously turn the signals collected into video images and integrate them into an animated picture. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? In a next blog, I’ll take you through a “test-drive” of that helmet…