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

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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Getting Work Done During Sleep

 Have mentioned here a number of times my involvement in related research.   Its covered in many posts.

MIT Just Discovered You Can Get Work Done Even While Asleep, And, of course, there's an app for that.

By Geoffrey James  in Inc.com

In evening sessions, participants attempted to solve brainteasers, each paired with a different music clip. Then, we presented some of the music clips while participants slept. In the morning, participants reattempted the same brainteasers they failed to solve the prior night. We were excited to find that participants solved more of the brainteasers that were cued overnight.  ....  References article here.

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.   ... " 

AI Sleep Technologies

This covers a number of approaches now being examined to provide 'personalized optimization' for sleep related problems.  Nicely laid out.  Very similar to other health related pattern recognition problems.  InVenturebeat.

Music for Sleep

Links to one of my own personal experiments.

Music as medicine: how songs could soon replace painkillers and help you sleep better

Marko Ahtisaari is attempting to fight opioid dependency with the natural high triggered by music. Anyone who wants to help the research can join an AI music experiment for free via their smartphone today ... " 

Sleep Apps by J&J

An area we examined as well, long before the era of mobile Apps.  In Adage:  " ... How J&J Research Led From Bath-Time to a Mobile Sleep App -- and More Products in Carts ... Global Campaign Includes Original Lullabies ... " 

Google Medical Sensor

In CWorld:   New sensors and new opportunities for analytics.

" ... Google has created a health-tracking wristband that could give health care professionals real-time information on the well-being of their patients.

The wearable can measure a patient's pulse, activity level, skin temperature and heartbeat rhythm. It's also able to monitor light levels and light exposure. This data could be used to learn more about patient behavior outside of the hospital and better treat ailments, Google said Tuesday. For example, data showing that a person isn't moving around frequently or  spending limited time outdoors could indicate illness, Google said.

Don't expect to use the device to track sleeping patterns or count steps. Unlike consumer-focused health and fitness wearables and smartwatches, Google's "cardiac and activity sensor" device is designed for medical settings, the company said.  ..." 

Big Data Blurring Industry Lines

In Forbes,   Morphing of analyses and businesses. Expect more of this.   And the partnership aspects, note the book Reciprocity Advantage , by colleagues Bob Johansen and Karl Ronn  previously mentioned, on this topic

" .. By way of example, let’s examine a well-known company being driven into multiple new industries through analytics. If you asked 100 people randomly on the street what Nike does, you’d probably get 98-percent or more telling you the company makes sneakers or sportswear. That’s true enough, but Nike has also become a pioneer in smart, wearable technologies, from its Nike+ running app in 2006, to the 2012 release of its FuelBand fitness tracker and its potential wearable tech-focused partnership with Apple. Products like the FuelBand contain sensors that automatically measure things like your sleep patterns and the number of steps you take each day.  I’m among the 3.3 million Americans who use FuelBand, or other devices like it. And, while Nike has plans to discontinue that particular physical product, wearable technology is helping Nike’s business model morph in new ways.  ... "

Holiday Shopper Research

Shopping never sleeps  More from Google retail. With statistics and visuals.  " ... This holiday shopping season will be our most connected ever, with devices at our fingertips helping us hunt for deals in stolen moments—whether on a laptop at work or on a smartphone right before bed. In fact, one third of all shopping searches on Google happen between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.1 That's because shopping doesn't stop once the mall closes. Today we’re researching purchases online at all hours of the day. To understand how digital trends will affect this year's shopping season, we conducted our annual Holiday Shopper Intentions research with Ipsos, surveying consumers on their shopping behavior. ... " 

Individual Data for Health

In the CACM:   Not a new idea, but more value as we leverage analytics against bigger data.  Even for our own N=1.

" ... Consider a new kind of cloud-based app that would create a picture of your health over time by continuously, securely, and privately analyzing the digital traces you generate as you work, shop, sleep, eat, exercise, and communicate. While there are personal devices and Internet services specifically designed for self-tracking (Fitbit, Patients like me, http://quantifiedself.com, and so forth), digital traces include a much richer corpus of data that we generate every day, just by virtue of our normal activities. And while the use of electronic health records is increasing, today's systems capture data reported by clinicians, not patients; and data about clinical treatment, not day-to-day activities. ... " 

Predicting Images in Dreams

In the Smithsonian Magazine.  Apparently we can now predict to some degree what people are seeing with a combination of fMRI and EEG sensors.  I observed a number of fMRI sessions that sought to determine consumer reactions to commercials.  Now can we reverse adapt the dreaming idea to load people with dreams of our products?  Hopefully not.  " ... Although it’s only capable of relatively crude predictions, the system demonstrates something surprising: Our dreams might seem like subjective, private experiences, but they produce objective, consistent pieces of data that can be analyzed by others. The researchers say this work could be an initial foray into scientific dream analysis, eventually allowing more sophisticated dream interpretation during deeper stages of sleep.... " 

Health Tracking Survey

In Information Week, a very good article and statistics about the use of mobile devices to track health information, based on a recent PEW survey.  " ... Seven in 10 U.S. adults track a health indicator such as weight, diet, exercise or a symptom of a chronic condition, according to the latest survey by the Pew Internet Project. But only 21% of these "trackers" use any kind of technology to do so -- 49% of trackers monitor their progress "in their heads," and 34% of them track the data on paper, using a notebook or a journal. Sixty percent of adults track their diet, exercise or weight, the survey of 3,014 people found. A third of them track other indicators such as blood pressure, blood sugar, sleep patterns or headaches. And 12% track health indicators for a loved one. ... "

Big Data and Health Care

An interesting example using the case of sleep apnea contributing to car accidents.

About Learning

Learning is a favorite topic of mine.  I supported a language laboratory study of sleep learning a long time ago and still follow this area.     Here in Wired "  ... an interview  with Robert Bjork, the director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, a distinguished professor of psychology, and a massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. ,,, "