These Sleep Engineers Could Help You Hack Your Dreams

A group at MIT’s Media Lab known as the “Dream Team” thinks you can harness your unconscious mind with tech you can wear to bed. Is the Cure for Superbugs Hiding Deep Under the Earth? - https://youtu.be/wu6kc8KIGXs Read More This MIT Machine Captures The Dreams You Never Remember https://www.fastcompany.com/90169959/this-mit-machine-captures-the-dreams-you-never-remember Beethoven, Poe, and Tesla all claimed to use a bizarre creative technique to come up with some of their ideas–a method that involved accessing their dreams to hunt down brilliant concepts and bring them into the conscious world. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to build on the fabled process with an interface for dreams. They call it Dormio. Lucid Dreaming Could Help Scientists Understand Mental Illness https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/vbxk7b/lucid-dreaming-could-help-scientists-understand-mental-illness Sleep and (non-lucid) dreaming perform a number of functions that are important for our emotional health. For example, over successive cycles of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (the phase during which most dreaming occurs), an overnight mood regulation takes place which “resets” emotional brain centers. For example, research has shown that we tend to become more sensitive to faces displaying angry or fearful expressions as the day progresses, but that a period of REM sleep can reverse this tendency. This kind of sleep is also known to help us find new, creative solutions to waking life issues. Essence: Olfactory Interfaces for Unconscious Influence of Mood and Cognitive Performance http://edithlaw.ca/cs889/2018/reading/Sensing/Paper8.pdf The sense of smell is perhaps the most pervasive of all senses, but it is also one of the least understood and least exploited in HCI. We present Essence, the first olfactory computational necklace that can be remotely controlled through a smartphone and can vary the intensity and frequency of the released scent based on bi