MIT RESEARCHERS CREATE WEARABLE DEVICE THAT CAN INFLUENCE THE CONTENT OF DREAMS

The technology, created by biomedical engineers Adam Haar Horowitz and Tomás Vega, could be used for further experiments into how dreams impact emotion, creativity, and memory

Your study is about ‘targeted dream incubation’. What exactly is that?

Adam Haar Horowitz (AH) In short, the idea is that you could target specific content to be incubated in dreams, which is a kind of cheap explanation, but there’s been a long history of trying to have subjects dream of something specific. Partially, the interest is clinical – we want to avoid nightmares, for example. Partially, it’s therapeutic – we want people to help work through the more emotional side of some content. And partially it’s memory-based – if you dream about something, you’re going to remember it better when you wake up. So, there are all kinds of reasons to have someone dream about something specific, but it’s failed consistently for the past hundred years. What people have tried to do, is show people some content while they’re awake, and then wake them up four hours later in a REM cycle and see if they’re dreaming about the thing they saw when they were awake.

The basic thing that our team did differently was to target this funny period, which is variably called ‘covert REM’ or ‘Stage 1 sleep’, that’s right at the onset of sleep. It’s a period that looks like REM sleep on EEG, and experientially it’s also like REM sleep – you have dreams – but you’re not fully unconscious; you don’t have a sensory cut off from the world and can still hear. Because we targeted that early period, it worked a hell of a lot better than past attempts at targeted incubation.

Tell us about the wearable device, Dormio, that you designed for use in your experiments.