Your dreams can be controlled by electrically stimulating your brain
It appears that applying an electrical current to your brain not only
boosts your cognitive powers, but it can also help you obtain the
mystical ability of lucid dreaming, where you can control the plot and
outcome of your dreams. These findings come from a new study that found
that lucid dreaming could be induced in a full 70% of participants, with
a simple (external) electrical current passed across the frontal lobe.
This has obvious applications for body hackers — but perhaps more
importantly it may have a medical use, too, in helping people who suffer
from chronic nightmares.
A lucid dream, if you haven’t heard of the phrase before, is a dream
where you know that you’re dreaming. So the theory goes, if you’re aware
that you’re dreaming, you can then exert some kind of control over your
brain’s imagination, resulting in some very fun, wild, and vivid
dreams. Some people report being naturally lucid dreamers, while body
hackers try to artificially induce a lucid dream state with various
different techniques (mostly involving meditation or setting an alarm
for a few hours after you fall asleep). Scientifically, some studies
have shown that during lucid dreaming there’s increased activity in your
brain’s frontal and parietal (top/side) lobes — regions of the brain
that are involved with higher-level conscious thought. Skeptics think
that lucid dreaming is more like small snippets of wakefulness
interspersed with normal REM dreaming, rather than a bona fide dream
state.
In this study, the researchers — mostly from a bunch of universities
in Germany — asked 27 men and women to spend a few nights sleeping in a
special sleep lab in Germany. After the participants entered REM sleep,
where most dreaming occurs, an electric current was passed across their
skull, stimulating the front and temporal lobes. The researchers found
that when the electrical current was a very specific frequency — between
25 and 40Hz — a full 70% of participants experienced lucid dreams. When
no current was present, or the wrong frequency, not a single
participant had a lucid dream.
[doi:10.1038/nn.3719 - "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity"]
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