Go inside Northwestern's Sleep Lab with researcher Karen Konkoly He’s lucid! Let’s do math That phenomenon led researchers to a key insight: If eye movement were consciously controlled, the dreamer’s eyes could become a vehicle for getting a message to the waking world. If you dream that you’re looking at something, your closed eyes move correspondingly as if you were looking at something while awake. As the name "rapid eye movement" suggests, however, there is an exception.ĭuring REM sleep, our eyes move around behind our eyelids in a seemingly random fashion, which often corresponds to the sleeper “looking” at various imagined things in their dream. That presents an obvious challenge for communications since we can’t move the body parts we typically use to communicate. Although our mind is active and dreams often occur during REM sleep, our bodies are almost completely paralyzed. REM sleep is notable not just for what’s moving - our eyes - but what isn’t. When the electrical signals are recorded and plotted, they chart the course our mind takes as we progress through the stages of sleep.Īs you sleep, your mind transitions through several different stages, from light sleep to deep sleep and eventually to REM sleep. Scientists have identified the different stages of sleep by monitoring electrical signals from the brain using electroencephalography, or EEG, and from other places in the body. Mazurek (left) sleeps in the lab as electrical signals from his brain and eyes are displayed on a computer monitor. It could really expand our view of consciousness and what the mind is capable of.”īut, how can a dreaming research subject communicate if they can’t even move, let alone speak, while sleeping? The answer requires so me explanation about what happens in our mind during sleep. With two-way communication, we could conduct some of the same experiments while people are sleeping. Konkoly describes the possibilities: “Right now, we conduct psychology experiments with people who are awake. The novel methods pioneered by Konkoly, Paller and their colleagues are designed to solve this problem and open entirely new areas of research focused on the dreaming mind. That deficiency has left an entire state of consciousness largely unexplored. “All we have are the stories people tell when they wake up,” says Paller. Research into the fundamental nature of dreams, and what the human mind can do while dreaming, has been limited by a seemingly unsolvable problem: you can’t get much information about someone’s dream while they’re actually having the dream. It may even lead to methods that could improve our ability to learn difficult skills or solve complex problems.Īnd, with the help of a new smartphone app from Paller’s lab, you could even try it at home. This discovery holds tantalizing possibilities for expanding our understanding of how our minds work. by Karen Konkoly, Paller’s doctoral student, and Christopher Mazurek, a volunteer research participant at the time of the study - and one of the first people to ever engage in a real-time dialogue from within a dream. National Science Foundation, the breakthrough was achieved in the U.S. Researchers at Paller’s lab at Northwestern University in Illinois, along with researchers in France, Germany and the Netherlands, have independently demonstrated two-way communication with people as they are lucidly dreaming during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. “It’s authentic communication,” says cognitive neuroscientist Ken Paller, who oversees the laboratory where this groundbreaking communication took place. two” is a dialogue between two people - one of whom was asleep and dreaming. The response - “two” - came from the mind of a sleeping research subject as he snoozed in a neuroscience laboratory outside Chicago. The first part - “eight minus six” - was transmitted by a scientist to a place just as exotic as the moon yet frequented by each of us. It’s not exactly “one small step for man,” but that humble mathematical message is extraordinary in its own way.
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