Day: September 6, 2012

Researchers successfully manipulate rat DREAMS… and human dreams could be next

Rat dreams: Researchers have successfully manipulated rat dreams, in a new study (stock photo)

Researchers have successfully manipulated rat dreams, and soon they could be manipulating what runs through humans’ minds at night. 

In an extremely creepy breakthrough, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology managed to influence what the animals were dreaming about by replaying an audio cure associated with the previous day’s events.

Unsurprisingly, that involved running through a maze.

Neuroscientist Matt Wilson, from the University’s Picower Institute for learning and memory, told io9.com that his team exploited the way the brain’s hippocampus encodes self-experienced events into memory. 

They already knew that when we sleep the hippocampus is busy replaying a number of the day’s events to consolidate our memory, but they didn’t know whether these ‘replays’ could be influenced by environmental cues.

Wilson trained a group of rats to run through a maze using two distinct audio signals.

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