Our dreamtime seems to be ripe for tinkering.
Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat’s dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day’s events, namely running through a maze (what else). The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep — but it also holds potential for the prospect of “dream engineering.”
Wilson and his team trained a group of rats to run through a maze using two distinct audio cues…and…recorded their neural activity. Later, while the rats were sleeping, the researchers once again recorded the neural activity of their brains [and] confirmed that the rats were dreaming of their maze navigating exploits from the day before.
But when the researchers played the audio cues from the experiment, they noticed a very interesting thing: the rats would dream about the section of the maze previously associated with the audio cue. The experiment demonstrated that the content of a rat’s dream can be biased by re-activating certain memories while they’re asleep.
( via io9.com)