Dream Machine: Helps brain exploitation in the most strange phase of sleep

Everything that is not in real life, will be in hypnagogia.

Every night, to go from alertness to sleep, you must cross a wild border of a semi-conscious state: Hypnagogia . Call it a wild border, because this phase of sleep has not yet been explored and exploited by science.

Most people rarely stop here, but just go through hypnagogia unconsciously to enter with sleep. But in fact, hypnagogia is one of the most fascinating periods of neurological experience. It is described as the source of creation, filled with great illusions and also scary, ideas that never appear in reality will be in hypnagogia.

This state is marvelous to the big names in natural sciences like Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, until writers like Allen Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Shelley have ever described it, even yearning for it. . From the 19th century, Thomas Edison even created a technique to master his hypnagogia sleep phase .

Thomas Edison slept in a lab chair in 1911.

If you leave everything natural, the hypnagogia state only lasts a few minutes and you can't even recognize it. During the transition from awake to sleep, you can experience super short dream segments. The content of these dreams is often random and most of you will not have any memories of them when you wake up.

Now, graduate student Adam Horowitz at MIT is leading a research team to change that. Horowitz and his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab developed a relatively simple device called Dormio . This device allows users to communicate with the hypnagogia stage of sleep.

Horowitz believed that the brief period between alertness and sleep was a source of creativity, but it was often hidden in the ocean of sleep. The idea is that, if you can enter the half-awake phase and then get out of it and still remain conscious, you will gain benefits from the state of strong combined thinking, which is What creates the characteristic of super-short and strange dreams that you experience on your way to sleep.

So far, Horowitz has tested the Dormio device on 8 objects and found that it can significantly maximize the amount of time users are in alertness and sleep. Moreover, Dormio could shape the content of the super short dreams they experienced.

In other words, MIT researchers have developed a low-cost device that allows users to communicate with their sleep.

When does a person sleeping really sleep?

Hypnagogia is the scientific name of the short-lived, half-awake state of sleep . It is still a mystery to neuroscientists. The reason because scientists are still controversial and inconsistent in determining when a person actually sleeps.

It's like trying to determine when a "real" person dies: When the heart stops beating, when they lose consciousness, or when the last cell stops copying?

However, one thing is certain, hypnagogia is a natural phenomenon that almost all of us meet every night.'Images or hallucinations in hypnagogia are a normal state of consciousness when it changes from alert to sleep , ' said Valdas Noreika, a psychologist at Cambridge.

Unlike other states of sleep that allow people to be aware of it, such as lucid dream during REM sleep, reaching hypnagogia does not allow awareness but does not require them. We have to practice to achieve its effects.

Hypnagogia is a common phenomenon, a very natural part of the circadian rhythm.

'The big questions are whether we are more creative in this state of consciousness and why in some cases hypnagogia leads to perfect dreams, whereas, in other cases it leads to a dreamless sleep, 'Noreika added.

A volunteer in Horowitz's laboratory.

It is difficult to determine exactly whether a person is in the hypnagogia stage, because they exhibit typical behavior of both sleep and alertness. Even from the subjective point of view of the person in hypnagogia and objectively from the observation of outsiders, it is impossible to distinguish.

Technically, hypnagogia occurs in stage 1 of sleep. It was so early that if you were woken up at this stage, you didn't even know that you had slept for a while. In the first stage of sleep, sleepers can still respond when someone is talking to them.

Moreover, people who are awakened from the hypnagogia stage often report strong visual and hearing hallucinations or their experience of super short dreams. But like sleep itself, what is considered a "dream" is still the subject of debate among neuroscientists.

Strange experiences from hypnagogia explain why even the famous scientists and artists in history longed to remain conscious in the hypnagogia period.

Thomas Edison, Edgar Allen Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Shelley, Albert Einstein, Salvador Dali, August Kekule, and Richard Wagner all expressed their passion for hypnagogia, and argued that their experience in this interference area brought a creativity, mental boom.

The idea that 'conscious access to hidden resources in the subconscious' is the root of creativity that is also recalled and developed more scientifically by the Nobel Prize-winning biologist Nobel Kandel in the 90s.

It is not surprising to know that many of these geniuses have actually practiced consciousness during the hypnagogia period to reap its creative benefits.

The most famous example of actively seeking hypnagogia is probably Thomas Edison's steel balls. According to recounted stories, Edison was able to enter and stay in hypnagogia by grabbing micro iron balls in his hand when he started to sleep.

If he fell asleep, his muscles relaxed and relaxed would surely make the iron balls float away from his hands and fall to the floor. That sound will make Edion wake up and return to sanity. With these super-short sleeps, Edison will never fall into perfect sleep, and he will experience the strange hallucinations and features of hypnagogia.

"All of these great thinkers all write very well about this state of mind, where the world starts to dissolve, and you still have the awareness of going into unconsciousness with memories mixed with virtual. Horowitz said. "Hypnagogia is a very good thing, but the best way people get into it is to drop a steel ball."

Dormio, part of the MIT Media Lab's initiative to communicate with sleep, is essentially a 21st-century version of the Edison technique used.

Dormio is dubbed the dream machine, allowing us to communicate with the hypnagogia stage.

Dream machine

Currently, Dormio has undergone two development versions, Horowitz said he and his collaborators are working with the third version. The first generation of Dormio consisted of an Arduino microcontroller attached to a glove with a small pressure sensor in the palm. It was designed by Horowitz with colleagues Ishaan Grover, Sophia Yang and Pedro Reynolds Cuéllar.

One wore this glove before going to bed and clenched their hands into fists. This action will put pressure on the sensor. At the same time, electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors monitor brain activity.

When the sensor is in the hand and the head detects that the person's muscles are relaxing and the brain waves are changing as they sleep, it activates a nearby Jibo robot that emits pre-programmed phrases. This phrase has the function of priming for the sleeper's brain to change the content of the dream based on what the Jibo robot has said.

However, there are some problems with this first version. First, EEG devices are quite expensive for ordinary users to use. And to analyze and understand the EEG signals is also quite complicated. In addition, the sensors in the palm only have two states - on or off - while the origin of sleep occurs gradually.

In order to overcome these shortcomings, Horowitz and his colleagues designed a new version of Dormio, replacing the sensors on and off in the palm into a bending sensor, helping to measure the strain range in detail. much more.

This means that researchers can monitor a person who gradually falls asleep with gradual relaxation of muscles. They also use simpler biological signaling methods, such as heart rate, to replace EEG. The mission of the Jibo robot is now transferred to an application on the smartphone.

Horowitz said the third generation Dormio will work only by monitoring eyelid movement. More and more, Dormio will become cheaper, easier to use and more comfortable for users. It is also non-invasive to make it easier for users to sleep when used.

Horowitz tested the first version of Dormio on 6 volunteers from MIT. Participants will come to the lab early in the evening and lie on a bench to go to sleep. When they are sleeping, the Jibo robot will remind them in one of two phrases: 'remember to think of a rabbit' or 'remember to think of a fork'. When the Dormio system detects that the participants are asleep, the robot will call their name and say "you're sleeping".

This is equivalent to Edison dropping his steel balls, but Dormio's goal is not to wake them up completely. Instead, the system only prevents users from falling into deeper sleep. This will make them linger in the hypnagogia state. Once the volunteers do that, the Jibo robot will ask what they are thinking and record the answer.

According to Horowitz's results were presented at the Computer-Human Interface conference in Montreal in April, although not all volunteers remember what they said to robots, but 'they all remember and report that I see the word mentioned in the dream, which shows the success of the concept and recalls the stimuli in the dreamy state as stated '.

"This means we have a viable system to control the dream," Horowitz said.

A volunteer is testing Dormio.

But Dormio is not just to manipulate the dream. Horowitz wanted to see if the access to conscious short-lived dreams would enhance creativity like Edison and others wanted.

When Horowitz's volunteers completed three tests with Dormio, they were asked to do a classic creative experiment called "Alternative Uses Task".

As its name suggests, this test requires participants to imagine as much as possible possible uses for an object. Volunteers were also asked to write a creative story based on the given words.

Although the famous creativity is something that is difficult to measure in any objective way, the results show that the use of Dormio enhances creativity compared to not using it.

Volunteers took an average of 158 seconds to compose their creative story after experiencing hypnagogia. 5 out of 6 volunteers scored higher on the Alternative Uses Task test after using Dormio.

When asked for subjective evaluations, 4 volunteers said that the ideas they created during hypnagogia were what they felt extremely creative.

"The idea did not come from myself, they just ran over my head," a volunteer reported. "I feel I don't really belong anywhere, inside this empty space, where all these ideas exist, it means that this empty space is where all the ideas exist. ".

"The reason you achieve different ways of handling information is because your brain is no longer itself at sleep," Horowitz said.

"You lose a lot of functionality in the frontal brain, which means you are in the field, you feel like losing control, losing your sense of time, losing your sense of space, and people will go in the way. Separating thinking, which is closely related to the creation of creative and strange solutions, solutions that you will ignore if completely awake '.

The future of Dormio

The idea of ​​communicating with dreams to promote creativity in a natural way is very attractive, but it is still an emerging field of research, requiring more testing. Currently, Horowitz is testing the second generation Dormio version on a larger group of people to find out how Dormio affects the hypnagogia stage.

In addition to collecting more data from volunteers, he and his colleagues are also working on developing a new Dormio version, capable of detecting the onset of hypnagogia by just tracking the eyelid movement.

Meanwhile, other researchers like Noreika are looking for ways to detect the neurological mechanisms behind the hypnagogia. It is a difficult phenomenon to explain because its effect varies from experiencing vivid hallucinations and dreams to the presence in the mind of phrases that have little to do with one's thinking before they fall asleep.

'While the neurological mechanism of hypnagogia has not been adequately studied, it seems that the rigid control of the pre-emptied prefrontal part of the brain has led to unpredictable experiences and feelings. First , ' said Noreika.

Dormio is expected to be a device that allows us to control our dreams.

However, hypnagogia still seems to be connected to each person's life experience. This means that some people are more likely to experience linguistic phenomena than hallucinations or sounds in their hypnagogia state.

In 2015, Noreika conducted research on a retired literature professor. He went to Noreika's lab to sleep and reported his experiences on his way to sleep. All 10 experiments were conducted.

In these sessions, literature professor reported his hypnagogia status characterized by 'intense language intrusions, which include new words naturally generated from foreign languages'. As Noreika pointed out, 'there is a possibility that those who do not have such extensive knowledge of language are not compromised like that'.

Horowitz described the connections between each volunteer's hypnagogia experience in their Dormio sessions, with real life. For example, when one of his volunteers was reminded with the word 'fork' it made him mutter 'colonial fork.'

'I asked him about that when he woke up , ' Horowitz said. 'He said: Oh, I ate at home, but here I have a sharp and cold metal tool, which I use to stab food and put it into my body. I guess it's a colonial motive. '

"He said he thought about the fork, but never thought he could think about it like that. Thinking about being able to access awareness, allowing you to realize yourself with this technology makes me find it very interesting, ' Horowitz said.