Ever wondered if dream recording (oneirography) is possible? Tomoyasu Horikawa from Kyoto University in Japan made a big step forward towards in this field. In a paper "Neural decoding of visual imagery during sleep" published last year in Science journal his team made a step forward by interpreting fMRI data to decode visual imagery.

Using machine learning models they tried to predict the contents of sleeping stages. With the assistance of lexical and image databases, they also discovered the link between human cortical activity patterns and verbal reports. You can see in following link the short movie where results of experiment are presented. Keep in mind that this movie is not an actual reconstruction of shape or colors seen in dreams. Images presented indicate what kind of visual representations from databases are present in the dreams based on similarity in brain activity.

In a paper "On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons" published in Nature (2010), Cerf and associates constructed machine that interpreted brain activity. According to their study, neurons in medial temporal lobe (MTL) response to particular visual objects. Patients where implanted with intracrainal electrodes. When asked to make an image fade in or out, their MTL neurons acted accordingly. They learnt over time to consciously regulate activity of their MTL neurons. This can be used not only in dream interpretation, but also in reading people's minds when they can not communicate.


There is an even company dedicated to recording and decoding dream state and conscious brain activities. Millennium Magnetic Technologies and it's founder have already patented Cognitive Engram technology (yeah, web presentation is really bad) that correlates specific brain patterns to specific thoughts.

Although these technologies are still under development, they show a great promise for a better understanding and treating some cognitive states. If you add up two recently published papers about memory engineering using long term potentiation/ depression and engram cell manipulation technique there is a lot to hope for.