Exploring Dreams at MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group

Way back I worked on some related topics, just happened on this.   A new interface? A way into the brain?  Anyone know other groups doing related things?

Youtube presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW0yxZ7Gp8E

DayDreamNight: A lucid evening at MIT exploring dreams

MIT Media Lab

950 views  Feb 1, 2023  #daydreamer #dreams #cultivatingcreativity

DayDreamNight was a gathering for the MIT community to explore the collaboration between CAST Visiting Artist Carsten Höller and the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group.

The selected projects open up avenues for understanding and shifting our sleep, dreams, and daydreams. 

More information at: 

Sleep & Dream theme page: https://mitmedialab.info/SleepDream 

Dream Hotel with Carsten Höller: https://mitmedialab.info/DreamHotel 

MIT Museum Studio: https://mitmedialab.info/mitmuseumstudio 

Flying Dreams: https://mitmedialab.info/FlyingDreams 

#dreams #daydreamer #daydreamnight#cultivatingcreativity

Communicating with Dreaming

Recall our early dream experiments.   Could this re-open our sleep learning goals?

Scientists Communicated With People While They Were Lucid Dreaming  By Shelly Fan  in Singularity Hub

We’ve probed the depths of Earth’s deepest trench, sent rovers to Mars, and observed other worlds billions of light years away. Yet we’ve never been able to decipher the mysterious, bizarre, and disjointed world of our own dreams. It seems impossible: after all, people who dream are fast asleep and oblivious to the outside world.

Except now, we can.

In a mind-bending paper published last week in Current Biology, teams of scientists from four countries found that it’s possible to communicate with people who are actively dreaming. It’s not simple information, either. The volunteers, roughly two dozen spread across four labs, were able to listen to math problems and answer them using facial twitches and eye movements. One group of sleepers could even decipher Morse code, and reply to the outside world in real time.

“Our experimental goal is akin to finding a way to talk with an astronaut who is on another world, but in this case the world is entirely fabricated on the basis of memories stored in the brain,” the researchers said.

This is crazy. Research into dreams has long relied on the recall of people after waking up, which—I’m sure you agree—is riddled with errors, confusion, and missed details. The new study means that we now have a way to directly engage with people while they’re deep asleep, probe the contents of their dreams, and potentially alter them.  ... " 

Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

Project, reexamining.   An idea long put aside.

MIT   Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

By Oscar Rosello   Project Contact:  Adam Haar Horowitz  Project Website  http://www.adamjhh.com/  

Inspiration:

Sleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a third of our lives are spent asleep. Current technological interfaces miss an opportunity to access the unique, imaginative, elastic cognition ongoing during dreams and semi-lucid states. In turn, each of us misses an opportunity to use interfaces to influence our own processes of memory consolidation, creative insight generation, gist extraction, and emotion regulation that are so deeply sleep-dependent. In this project, we explore ways to augment human creativity by extending, influencing, and capturing dreams in Stage 1 sleep. It is currently impossible to force ourselves to be creative because so much creative idea association and creative incubation happens in the absence of executive control and directed attention. Sleep offers an opportunity for prompting creative thought in the absence of directed attention, if only dreams can be controlled. ... 

During sleep onset, a window of opportunity arises in the form of hypnagogia, a semi-lucid sleep state where we all…  

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Dream Manipulation

Now here is some scary.   Or a means of entertainment?   Or creativity enhancement?   Note also the connection to other senses like smell.  (Once again I will mention that we did similar experiments long ago, in what was called sleep-learning then,  later largely debunked in that form, at the U of Pa Language Laboratory) 

An MIT Lab Is Building Devices to Hack Your Dreams

From improving your mood to focusing your creativity, scientists at MIT’s Dream Lab want to prove the power of dreams   ....   Including Pattie Maes      Article by Tessa Love   in OneZero

Introductory video:   https://youtu.be/ZBLejVwX85o  

MIT Tests 'Dream Incubation' Device That Manipulates The Content of People's Dreams  By Peter Dockrill   in ScienceAlert

Scientists have developed an experimental device and protocol for manipulating the content of people's dreams while they are sleeping, by making them recall specific cues that can trigger targeted dream themes and experiences.

While the boundless dream-building of Inception remains the stuff of science fiction for now, the new research shows that the evolving science of dream control is far more than fantasy – and that information processing during sleep is capable of being engineered from the outside.

In a new study, a team led by neuroscientist Adam Haar Horowitz from MIT describes how a wearable electronic device – called Dormio – enables what the researchers term 'targeted dream incubation' (TDI), during the fluid first stage of sleep where the sleeper experiences a borderland state of consciousness called hypnagogia.   ... " 

Dreams

Seems we have done little in the space since Freud.  Is interesting to see Nokia in the space.  Gathering data is again a good place to start.   AI I assume to mine and classify in new ways.

Insights Into Dreams and What They Say About Us
The Wall Street Journal
Robert Lee Hotz

Computer scientists are using artificial intelligence and digital databases to examine dreams and potentially identify mental issues. Researchers at Cambridge University's Nokia Bell Laboratories in the U.K. devised the Dreamcatcher data-mining system to seek patterns in dreams, and analyzed transcripts in the DreamBank, the largest known public archive of dream reports. The system identifies and measures dream characters, interactions, and emotions by processing the natural language dreamers use to communicate their visions. Insights derived from this analysis add credibility to the theory that dreams reflect waking situations, with no deeper prophetic, mythological, or religious significance. ... " 

Robots need to Dream?

Cognitive Architecture, allowing some reorganization for changing context?

When robots dream: AI systems may learn better and faster if they can ‘sleep’  By Gina Smith in Silicon Angle

As any science fiction fan knows, it’s always a bad sign when a robot has dreams or visions of its own. Think Isaac Asimov’s short story collection “Robot Dreams,” Alex Proyas’ 2006 dystopian whodunit “I, Robot” or Kike Maíllo’s 2011 thriller “Eva.“

But for artificial intelligence researchers, the whole notion is anything but a nightmare scenario. In fact, dreaming may be the key to creating AI systems, agents and robots that learn faster and more deeply — that is, more like humans do.

“What we’re trying to do is incorporate sleep and dreamlike processes into the cognitive architecture of machines,” says Natalia Díaz Rodríguez, a researcher for the Paris-based research initiative, Project DREAM, which stands for Deferred Restructuring of Experiences in Autonomous Machines. ... "