Brain Machine of the Future Could Record Your Dreams

It sounds like something concocted by Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry, but developments in the monitoring of brain activity suggest we might soon have machines capable of recording and playing back dreams. Here's more from io9:

A team writing in Nature has announced that it has developed a brain-machine interface capable of recording higher level brain activity. Moran Cerf and his team at UCLA have been able to connect the activity of individual neurons with specific images. When an individual thinks about these images, the neurons light up, and, if they are hooked up to a brain-machine interface, can call up a specific image on a computer screen. Cerf's team has been able to identify a handful of these image-specific neurons in each participant in a recent study, specific neurons that light up when an individual thinks about, for example, the Eiffel Tower or Marilyn Monroe.

---

\n

Clef sees potential applications as being able to understand the minds of people who are unable to communicate, or, perhaps more incredibly, being able to write and send emails simply by thinking them.

Find more information at BBC News.