Intelligent Design Mind Neuroscience

Neuroscientists demonstrate that we can communicate with people while they are dreaming

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At one time, the idea of communicating with people while they were dreaming would have been regarded by most scientists as hokey New Age stuff. But now a research group has done it:

What people can do during lucid dreams was unexpected:

“Overall, the researchers found that it was possible for people while dreaming to follow instructions, do simple math, answer yes-or-no questions, or tell the difference between different sensory stimuli. They could respond using eye movements or by contracting facial muscles. The researchers refer to it as “interactive dreaming.” – Cell Press, “Real-time Dialogue with A Dreaming Person is Possible” At Sciencedaily (February 18, 2021) the Paper is Open Access.”

The researchers hope that their find will help people who must cope with nightmares or other sleep disorders.

News, “Yes, we can communicate with people when they are dreaming” at Mind Matters News

Later, they hope subjects will describe dreams so they can check whether recall after the fact matches descriptions in real time.

See also:  Your soul has no Off switch: A major modern misunderstanding of the human mind is to assume that it is like a machine with an “on” and an “off” switch. (Michael Egnor)

5 Replies to “Neuroscientists demonstrate that we can communicate with people while they are dreaming”

  1. 1
    ronvanwegen says:
    February 20, 2021 at 8:37 pm

    Could the FBI obtain someone’s phone password while they were asleep? It might be more effective than torturing them but not as much fun I guess.

  2. 2
    polistra says:
    February 21, 2021 at 8:53 am

    Nothing new about this. When sleep is in a mode with the audio channel partly open, external words enter dreams. The tricky part is that the dream scripter re-interprets the words to fit the narrative of the running dream.

    http://polistrasmill.blogspot......cript.html

  3. 3
    polistra says:
    February 21, 2021 at 9:00 am

    Incidentally, the article itself is HORRIBLE. The sleeping person is being strangled by a muzzle because muzzles are in fashion this year.

    Before 2020 this would have failed all university ethics committees, and the picture would become infamous in the same way as the Milgram experiment.

    Imagine the proposal being reviewed in 2019: “We will allow subjects to sleep in our lab while we try to communicate with them during dreams. And we will strangle them with muzzles while sleeping, which has nothing to do with the experiment except that we insist everyone should be strangled at all times.”

    Milgram. Hitler.

  4. 4
  5. 5
    bornagain77 says:
    February 21, 2021 at 6:15 pm

    Of related note:

    Signs of ‘Hidden Consciousness’ May Predict Who Will Emerge from a Coma
    By Rachael Rettner June 27, 2019
    Some patients in a coma or vegetative state after brain injury show signs of “hidden consciousness” that may predict their chances of getting better, a new study suggests.
    In the study, the researchers used a special algorithm to analyze the brain waves of more than 100 patients who were unresponsive after brain injury. They found that, within several days of the injury, about 1 in 7 of these patients showed distinct patterns of brain activity in response to commands to move their hands. This brain activity suggested that the patients understood the commands, but couldn’t perform the movements, the authors said.
    What’s more, patients with these signs were more likely to recover than patients who had no signs of hidden consciousness, according to the study, which is published today (June 26) in the New England Journal of Medicine.
    “This study shows that some patients who are unresponsive for days or longer may have cognitive processing capabilities sufficient to distinguish commands, and those patients have a higher chance of recovering,” lead study author Dr. Jan Claassen, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons,
    https://www.livescience.com/65805-hidden-consciousness-recovery-from-coma.html

    Also of note:

    When Alzheimer’s Victims Suddenly ‘Perk Up’ Just Before Death — What’s Going On? – 09/29/2014
    Conventional brain science has no explanation. It has long assumed that as the brain goes, so goes the mind; for the brain is what gives rise to the mind. The return of mental clarity and memory in a brain ravaged by Alzheimer’s is not supposed to happen. Yet it does in some cases.
    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-miracle-of-terminal-l_b_5863492

    One Last Goodbye: The Strange Case of Terminal Lucidity
    I’m as sworn to radical rationalism as the next neo-Darwinian materialist. That said, over the years I’ve had to “quarantine,” for lack of a better word, a few anomalous personal experiences that have stubbornly defied my own logical understanding of them.
    By Jesse Bering on November 25, 2014
    Excerpt: Yet, even if terminal lucidity is a genuine phenomenon, who’s to say there isn’t a logical scientific explanation, one involving some unknown brain physiology? Nahm and Greyson don’t discount this possibility entirely, but for cases involving obvious brain damage (such as strokes, tumors, advanced Alzheimer’s disease) that should render the patient all but vegetative, not functioning normally, it’s a genuine medical mystery. According to the authors, terminal lucidity also isn’t all just in the perceiver’s head. Rather, they write, “it seems to be more common than usually assumed, and reflects more than just a collection of anecdotes that on closer scrutiny emerge as wishful thinking.”
    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/one-last-goodbye-the-strange-case-of-terminal-lucidity/

    Even more interesting than these physical revivals, however, are revivals in mental functioning. Myers (1892b) had referred to the “sudden revivals of memory or faculty in dying persons” (p. 316), and there are scattered reports of people apparently recovering from dementia shortly before death. The eminent physician Benjamin Rush, author of the first American treatise on mental illness (1812), observed that “most of mad people discover a greater or less degree of reason in the last days or hours of their lives” (p. 257). Similarly, in his classic study of hallucinations, Brierre de Boismont (1859) noted that “at the approach of death we observe that… the intellect, which may have been obscured or extinguished during many years, is again restored in all its integrity” (p. 236). Flournoy (1903, p. 48) mentioned that French psychiatrists had recently published cases of mentally ill persons who showed sudden improvement in their condition shortly before death.
    In more recent years, Osis (1961) reported two cases, “one of severe schizophrenia and one of senility, [in which] the patients regained normal mentality shortly before death” (p. 24). Osis and Haraldsson (1977/1997) reported a case of a meningitis patient who had been “severely disoriented almost to the end,” but who “cleared up, answered questions, smiled, was slightly elated and just a few minutes before death, came to herself” (p. 133). Turetskaia and Romanenko (1975) reported three cases involving remission of symptoms in dying schizophrenic patients. Grosso (2004, pp. 42–43) described three dementia cases that had been reported to him, one by a colleague and two by a nurse. In all three cases, the patient had not recognized family members for several years, but shortly before death they all were said to have become more coherent or alert and to have recognized family members. Such cases are few in number and not adequately documented, but the persistence of such reports suggests that they may represent a real phenomenon that could potentially be substantiated by further investigations. If so, they would seriously undermine the assumption that, in such diseases as Alzheimer’s, the mind itself is destroyed in lockstep with the brain (e.g., Edwards, 1997, pp. 295–296). Like many of the experiences discussed in this chapter, such cases would suggest that in some conditions, consciousness may be enhanced, not destroyed, when constraints normally supplied by the brain are sufficiently loosened.
    – Irreducible Mind, Edward F. Kelly

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