As I was reading through my news feeds this morning I came across this cool article on NPR.org about a computer program that can scan your brain waves and reconstruct what your seeing.  The researchers believe that this technique could someday be used to reconstruct dreams or to communicate.

Of course the technology is still a long way from that point but I still find it pretty amazing how far we have come. Everyone who has done dream interpretation knows how difficult it is to remember your dreams clearly. By far that is the number one thing that I am asked how to improve.  If we had access to technology that could retrieve our dreams, even with poor clarity, that could drastically improve our ability to interpret our dreams.

Here is a short excerpt from the article, I highly recommend you go and read the whole thing. If your interested in dream research this is pretty cool.

It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed.

Scientists reported that result Thursday and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday.

In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper.

He believes such a technique could eventually reconstruct a dream or other made-up mental movie well enough to be recognizable. But the experiment dealt with scenes being viewed through the eyes at the time of scanning, and it’s not clear how much of the approach would apply to scenes generated by the brain instead, he said.

People shouldn’t be worried about others secretly eavesdropping on their thoughts in the near future, since the technique requires a person to spend long periods in an MRI machine, he noted.

Another expert said he expected any mind-reading capability would appear only far in the future.

Source: Can Computers Reconstruct Your Dreams? by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Can Computers Dream? Not yet but I did find this cool video…