Dream songs

Last night I dreamed that our local mall had been converted into a giant used book store.  (Something I would entirely approve of.)  We were going to to go shopping ("we" being my wife, me, and our younger son, who lives in Houston but was apparently up for a visit) but we realized that a bunch of other family members were unexpectedly going to descend upon us, and for some reason we knew they were going to walk into our house without knocking, which our dogs would not appreciate, so we had to get home fast.  But while trying to get out of the mall we were hindered by a bunch of science-fiction cosplayers wearing silver body paint.

After that, it got kind of weird.

Dreams are a very peculiar thing, but they (and the REM sleep stage during which they occur) are ubiquitous in the brainier species of animals.  In fact, as I'm writing this, my puppy Jethro is curled up in his bed by my desk dreaming about something, because his paws are twitching and every once in a while he makes a very cute little "oof" noise.  But what would a puppy dream about?  Presumably the things that make up his waking life -- playing, chasing squirrels, swimming in our pond, eating his dinner.

You have to wonder if sometimes dogs, like humans, have weird dreams, and what they might make of them.

The function of dreaming is unknown, but what's certain is that it's necessary.  Suppress REM and dreaming, and the results are hallucinations and psychosis.  Aficionados of Star Trek: The Next Generation will no doubt remember the chilling scene in the episode "Night Terrors," where something is preventing the crew from experiencing REM sleep, and Dr. Crusher is in the makeshift morgue where the victims of a massacre are being examined -- and when she turns around, all the dead bodies are sitting up, still shrouded in their sheets.  She closes her eyes -- exhibiting far more bravery than I would have -- and says, "This is not real," and when she opens them, they're all lying back down again.

*shudder*

In any case, what brings up this topic today is far cheerier; a fascinating piece of research out of the University of Buenos Aires that looked at dreams in an animal we usually don't associate with them -- birds.  A team led by Gabriel Mindlin looked at a species of bird called the Great Kiskadee (Pitangus sulphuratus), a brightly-colored and vocal flycatcher found in much of Central and South America.  

Mindlin is one of the foremost experts in the physiology of bird song.  Birds have a unique apparatus called the syrinx that allows them to make some of the most complex vocalizations of any group of animals; not only can some (such as many wrens and thrushes) produce two or more tones at the same time, birds like parrots, mynahs, lyrebirds, and starlings are brilliant mimics and can imitate a variety of other sounds, including human speech.  (A lyrebird in a park in Australia learned to convincingly imitate a chainsaw, a car alarm, various cellphone ringtones, and a camera shutter.)

What Mindlin and his team did was to implant electrodes in the obliquus ventralis muscle, the main muscle birds use to control pitch and volume in vocalization, and also outfit some Great Kiskadees with devices to monitor their brain waves.  When the birds went into REM sleep, the researchers found that the OV muscle was contracting in exactly the way it does when the birds vocalize while awake.

The birds were singing silently in their sleep!

Singing in birds generally serves two purposes; mate attraction and territorial defense.  (As one of my AP Biology students put it, "they sing when they're mad or horny.")  It's more complicated than that -- science generally is -- but as a broad-brush explanation, it'll do.  Many species have different songs and calls for different purposes, each associated with a specific pattern of contractions and relaxation of the muscles in the syrinx.  Mindlin and his team used software capable of taking the muscle movements the electrodes detected and decoding them, determining what song the bird would have been producing if it was awake.  What they found was that the song their test subjects were dream-singing was one associated with marking out territories. 

"I felt great empathy imagining that solitary bird recreating a territorial dispute in its dream," Mindlin said.  "We have more in common with other species that we usually recognize."

So birds dream, and the content of their dreams is apparently -- just like Jethro -- taken from their own umwelt, the slice of sensory experience they engage with while they're awake.  (I wrote in more detail about the umwelt a while back, if you're curious.)  

On the other hand, how this accounts for my dream of silver-body-painted cosplayers in a mall filled with old books, I have no idea.

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Dreaming Invisible

What would an artificial intelligence dream about?

We may have just found out.

An AI development company called Nested Minds is working on creating increasingly sophisticated deep learning networks modeled on the connectivity of the human brain, and especially the brain's ability to form links between disparate ideas and images -- something that is a significant part of the creative process, and also seems to account for a lot of dream content.  Their project, called "Huxley," has generated some pretty amazing and provocative pieces.  On their home page, they describe their project this way:

Nested Minds unites an interdisciplinary team of neuroscientists, mathematicians, developers, social scientists, and entrepreneurs with over 100 years of combined experience building predictive analytics and machine learning models across multiple industries...  We designed Huxley, an AI artist who takes concepts rooted in human language and translates them into provocative and daring imagery redefining the boundaries of imagination.

What Huxley excels at is what we would describe in humans as free association.  For example, the word "keyboard" prompted Huxley to come up with an image of a zebra; the link, presumably, was keyboard > black and white > zebra.  A bass guitar generated a fish; bass has both meanings (although pronounced differently).  While this may seem to be a rudimentary sort of punning, it's not so different from what happens during a long, rambling conversation.  I can remember my younger son and I talking and at some point trying to figure out how we got where we ended up, backtracking every link and reconstructing the whole causal chain -- Doctor Who > time travel > wormholes > astronomy > Galileo > the Inquisition > Monty Python > King Arthur > Camelot > Cornwall etc.

What I find absolutely fascinating is that Nested Minds turned Huxley loose on a song -- a new release from Duran Duran called "Invisible."

The result is weird, surreal, beautiful, and a little disturbing.  (The song is pretty awesome, too.)  Watch it and see what you think:

"When you look at Huxley, this is the sort of first new generation of this type of intelligence, but that will grow and be useful in many, many other fields," singer/keyboardist Nick Rhodes said, in an interview in ITV. "It's incredible new technology because before AI has been more mathematical, this one's actually more arts based.  It does actually dream and think in different ways...  I think we've always viewed technology as something that we can use that can really help us.  We're not intimidated by it...  And if you can use it to enhance your toolkit for what you're doing, I think that's fantastic."

Huxley was given two things -- the lyrics, and video clips of the band singing, and with those two inputs it created the entire video.  And while some of the associations you can fathom (such as the keyboard and the bass guitar), others are obscure and/or complex enough to resist parsing.

"They just took those images of us all singing and put them into the program," said band member Roger Taylor.  "And it came out with these incredible kind of ghostly images which kind of blew me away."

Is this creativity -- I mean, of course, on the part of Huxley, not of its creators nor of Duran Duran themselves?  I don't think you can call it anything other than that.  To me, a large part of creativity is novelty; when we say, "wow, that was really creative," we often mean, "I would never have come up with that."  There has to be some technical skill too, of course.  Depicting that novel connection in a vivid manner requires that you have significant ability in your chosen medium, whether it's writing, music, art, or any other creative endeavor.  But simple technical skill isn't enough.  That spark -- that melding of ideas, words, or images in a unique way -- is absolutely essential, or what you have is no more than a rehashing (however well executed) of what you've seen other people do.

It's true in science, too, isn't it?  A really groundbreaking discovery occurs because someone put data together in such a way as to generate an insight no one else had.  As just one of many examples, take Fred Vine's and Drummond Matthews's development of the model of plate tectonics, using data from magnetic traces on the ocean floor, the geology of mountain ranges on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, the prehistoric animal fossils that had been dug up in Africa and South America, and the presence of active volcanoes along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.  We'd had all of that information prior to Vine and Matthews; but they were the first to have the insight to put the pieces together, and what they came up with revolutionized the whole field of geology.

That's creativity.

But back to Huxley.  What I find most amazing about this is that this is the first attempt at a music video created entirely by an artificial intelligence, so the creative output can only be expected to improve over time.  What will Huxley, or something like it, be creating in ten years?  Fifty years?  A century?

I think we creative types better hold onto our hats, because my guess is that we're seeing something humanity has never seen before -- the creative output of a non-human intelligence.  And what it can teach us about our own creativity might be only the first step into what is truly uncharted territory.

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Saber-toothed tigers.  Giant ground sloths.  Mastodons and woolly mammoths.  Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa.  North American camels, hippos, and rhinos.  Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.

What do they all have in common?  Besides being huge and cool?

They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago.  Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.

What caused their demise?

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions.  Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.  

Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!] 

Dream weaving

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Night Terrors," the ship gets trapped in a phenomenon called "Tyken's Rift," one of the myriad hand-waving scientific phenomena they came up with as plot devices.  It's some sort of rip in the space-time continuum -- I swear, given how often it rips in that show, you'd swear the space-time continuum was made of wet Kleenex -- and the upshot is that it causes a weird result for the crew.  They lose their ability to drop into REM sleep, so they're prevented from dreaming.

And it causes them to start hallucinating, and eventually, to go violently insane.  It'd happened to another ship, whose crew ended up killing each other.  This led to one of the single creepiest images the show ever came up with, while Dr. Crusher is in the morgue doing post-mortems on the dead crew members -- and is beginning to hallucinate herself.

There are a number of aspects of the episode that are pretty silly, but this one scene works brilliantly, mainly because it highlights exactly how surreal and terrifying dreams can be.  While you're inside them, they seem absolutely real.  In the last couple of years, I've had a number of dreams of being attacked by an animal -- odd in and of itself, because I always have gotten along with animals.  Dogs, in fact, like me a great deal better than people do.  But each time, I'm minding my own business, and some animal charges me, causing me to wake up, and more than once, to shout out, waking my poor long-suffering wife.

Why do I dream this stuff?  In fact, why does anyone dream what they do?  That's an interesting, and not an easy, question.  It brings to mind a topic that came periodically in my biology classes, involving the difference between proximal and ultimate causes.  In a proximal sense, we know that dreaming is caused by an activation of the visual and auditory cortices and a reduction in activity of the prefrontal cortex during REM sleep, triggering us to imagine vivid images and sounds while simultaneously shutting off one of the primary "reality filters" we have (explaining why dreams can seem to make sense while we're in them, and completely batshit insane once we wake up).

But when students asked "why do we dream?" that's not usually what they meant.  They were looking for a deeper, ultimate cause -- what purpose does it serve?  What is the overarching reason for dreaming?  And there, we go into what is largely uncharted territory.  Science, it turns out, is not so good at teleology -- the analysis of ultimate causes, explanations that don't just look at the mechanism, but the purpose or driver behind them.

This is why I was a little dubious about a paper by Erik Hoel of Tufts University that appeared in the journal Patterns last week.  Entitled, "The Overfitted Brain: Dreams Evolved to Assist Generalization," Hoel claims that his study of artificial intelligence/deep neural networks suggests that the purpose of dreams is to help us generalize what we've learned -- that our ordinary experience gives us limited ability to develop flexibility (i.e., we usually are confronted with the same stuff over and over again), so dreams interject a hefty dose of pure weirdness to help us learn to deal with the unexpected.

Hoel writes:

Understanding of the evolved biological function of sleep has advanced considerably in the past decade.  However, no equivalent understanding of dreams has emerged.  Contemporary neuroscientific theories often view dreams as epiphenomena, and many of the proposals for their biological function are contradicted by the phenomenology of dreams themselves.  Now, the recent advent of deep neural networks (DNNs) has finally provided the novel conceptual framework within which to understand the evolved function of dreams.  Notably, all DNNs face the issue of overfitting as they learn, which is when performance on one dataset increases but the network's performance fails to generalize (often measured by the divergence of performance on training versus testing datasets).  This ubiquitous problem in DNNs is often solved by modelers via “noise injections” in the form of noisy or corrupted inputs.  The goal of this paper is to argue that the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain's overfitting during its daily learning.  That is, dreams are a biological mechanism for increasing generalizability via the creation of corrupted sensory inputs from stochastic activity across the hierarchy of neural structures.  Sleep loss, specifically dream loss, leads to an overfitted brain that can still memorize and learn but fails to generalize appropriately. 

It's an interesting idea.  And I have to admit that the dream I had a few nights ago, wherein a horse jumped a fence and charged straight at me, hooves flying and teeth bared, is pretty fucking stochastic.  I am, however, a bit wary of any claim of the form "X is a widespread phenomenon, and it happens because of Y."  Complex phenomena -- which dreaming certainly is, given people's varied experience of it -- seldom have only a single proximal cause, much less a single ultimate cause.  And as I said, ultimate causes are notoriously tricky to identify anyhow.  Even some simpler questions to frame than dreaming -- such as why humans have upright posture -- have yet to be settled.  (Some suggestions are that it was to give us farther sight distance in the grasslands where we evolved, to leave our hands free to manipulate tools, that it made it easier to wade in order to gather aquatic organisms like shellfish for food, that it improved walking and running endurance, that it allowed our ancestors to reach fruit in trees more easily, that it made it easier for mothers to hold their infants while moving from place to place...  In point of fact, it could be any of these, all of these, or various other advantages not on the list, and it would be extremely difficult to discern which is correct.)

All of which is not meant to criticize Hoel's hypothesis specifically, because it's pretty intriguing.  I'm just always hesitant to jump to an appealing explanation just because "it sounds like it makes sense."  Reality is awfully complex, and explanations can be hard to come by.

But whatever the reason is, I'd sure like it if I could stop dreaming about being attacked by vicious animals.  My wife would like it, too.  Being awakened in the middle of the night because your husband is dreaming he's being attacked by a raging wombat kind of gets old after a while.

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Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Views of the block universe

In the beginning of my as-yet unpublished novel In the Midst of Lions, the character of Mary Hansard realizes one day that she can no longer tell apart the past and the future.

She has memories of both -- if you can call a mental picture of something from the future a memory -- and they both carry equal weight in her brain.  She can determine which is which only in the rare cases where she can verify if an event has occurred yet, such as her "memory" that a building in her neighborhood had burned down, when the (intact) building itself is right in front of her.  But in other cases, such as a conversation between her and a friend, she has no way to know whether it has already happened, or will happen in the future.

For Mary, there aren't three classes of events -- past, present, and future.  There are only two: present and not-present.  A good chunk of the first part of the book is an exploration of how that would affect someone psychologically.  (A summary: "not well.")

The funny thing is that there's nothing in this situation that specifically breaks the laws of physics.  (It's not accidental that I made the character of Mary a high school physics teacher.)  In 2019 I wrote about the peculiar and unresolved problem of "the arrow of time" -- that virtually all physical processes are time-reversible, meaning that they work equally well backwards and forwards.  A simple example is if you watched a video of a pool ball bouncing off the bumper of a billiards table, then ran it backward, there would be no obvious way to tell which was which.  (If you had a longer video, you might be able to tell, because friction with the table would bleed away energy from the ball, causing it to slow down -- so the forward version is the one that shows the ball slowing down, and the backward version is the one in which it speeds up.  This is the approach of the arrow of time problem from the angle of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; if you want to know more, you can check out my post linked above.)

So in terms of physics, it's mystifying why we perceive an arrow of time, when it seems like there's no reason we shouldn't have equal access to both past and future.  "Time is an illusion," Albert Einstein said, "but it is a remarkably persistent one."

Things get even weirder when you start looking into physicist Hermann Minkowski's idea of a block universe, where the three dimensions of space and one of time are mapped onto a three-dimensional solid.  Picture it as a loaf of bread that you can slice at any angle.  The angle of the slice is determined by the relative speed of your reference frame in comparison to the reference frame of what you're looking at, but what it leads us to is that the present loses its simultaneity -- two events that are simultaneous in one reference frame might occur sequentially in another.  Pushed to its ultimate conclusion -- and it must be interjected at this point that once again, there is nothing about Minkowski's ideas that breaks any known law of physics -- this means that an event that is in the past for me might be in the future for you, and therefore all of temporal sequencing is relative.  Minkowski showed that you can model the universe as a block within which exists not only everything in space, but everything in time.  The fact that we haven't gotten to events in the future is no more remarkable than the fact that we haven't gotten to some locations in space yet.  They're still out there, they still exist, even if we haven't seen them.

Kind of casts a harsh light on the concept of free will, doesn't it?

In any case, the topic comes up not because of physics, but because of an article by science writer Eric Wargo over at the site Inner Traditions called "The Amazing Reality of Dream Precognition."  It's an unfortunate choice of titles, because the article is well written and way less woo-woo than it sounds.  Wargo is seriously trying to figure out if people have access to the future, specifically through dreams, and has a project going to do some citizen science and have a large number of people record their dreams, then sift through them to see if there are examples of actual precognition.

It's an interesting idea, although there are some difficulties.  One is that Wargo claims that a lot of dream precognition is symbolic in nature; for example, you might dream of seeing a photograph of a friend shattered into pieces, and soon after she is injured in a terrible automobile accident.  But this requires that we rely on our own interpretation of the symbols after the fact.  And if there's one thing I've learned from ten years of writing here at Skeptophilia, it's that humans are really good at remodeling what actually happened to fit with what they think happened.

That said, Wargo is going about things the right way.  One of the things that has plagued serious research into precognition is that you only know a dream (or thought) is precognitive after the event has occurred, at which point there's always the possibility that your memory of the allegedly precognitive event has been contaminated by your knowledge of what really happened.  Also, there's the unfortunate fact that there are lots of cases of outright falsification.  If the records are made beforehand, this reduces the likelihood of this sort of thing, although it still requires that there be some kind of rigorous standard for keeping track of when the records were written down relative to the event they allegedly predicted.

So the idea is interesting, to say the least, and I need to keep in mind that my inclination to say "this is impossible" is itself a bias.  Even the lack of a mechanism for precognition -- something about which I've written before -- sort of evaporates if Minkowski was right about the block universe.  It still might not explain how you and I, both on the same planet moving at the same speed in the same reference frame, have access to different slices of the spacetime loaf, but at least it takes away one of the most consistent objections, which is that the future is fluid and therefore precognition would constitute looking at something that has no physical reality.

Reminds me of the "fixed points in time" in Doctor Who.  Maybe the truth is that everything is a fixed point in time, not just big events like the eruption of Pompeii.

So I'll be interested to see what Wargo comes up with.  Me, I'm keeping an open mind about the whole thing, as counterintuitive as it may seem to me.  If he can come up with actual evidence of precognition, dream or otherwise, it'll force me to re-evaluate a good chunk of how I think the world works.  And my character of Mary Hansard in In the Midst of Lions may turn out to be a rather alarming case of Plato's belief that "art mimics life."

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If, like me, you love birds, I have a book for you.

It's about a bird I'd never heard of, which makes it even cooler.  Turns out that Charles Darwin, on his epic voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, came across a species of predatory bird -- the Striated Caracara -- in the remote Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina.  They had some fascinating qualities; Darwin said they were "tame and inquisitive... quarrelsome and passionate," and so curious about the odd interlopers who'd showed up in their cold, windswept habitat that they kept stealing things from the ship and generally making fascinating nuisances of themselves.

In A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey, by Jonathan Meiberg, we find out not only about Darwin's observations of them, but observations by British naturalist William Henry Hudson, who brought some caracaras back with him to England.  His inquiries into the birds' behavior showed that they were capable of stupendous feats of problem solving, putting them up there with crows and parrots in contention for the title of World's Most Intelligent Bird.

This book is thoroughly entertaining, and in its pages we're brought through remote areas in South America that most of us will never get to visit.  Along the way we learn about some fascinating creatures that will make you reconsider ever using the epithet of "birdbrain" again.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Living the dream

A lucid dream occurs when you are aware you're dreaming while you're dreaming -- and (apparently) with practice, you can learn to control what happens.

Which sounds kind of awesome, but I've never had one.

I came close one time.  A while back I had a dream of being in a wedding party in a big old cathedral -- vaulted ceilings, stained glass, huge pipe organ, the works.  I don't recall recognizing the bride and groom, or (in fact) any of the other people present, but anyhow, there I was with other formally-dressed people, flanking the happy couple as they recited their vows.

When the priest got to the "if anyone objects to this marriage" bit, that's when things got weird.  An old lady in the front row stood up and said, "I object!" in a really nasal, grating voice.  She then began a recitation of how awful the bride and groom were, how she couldn't stand either of them, and how she was only there to let 'em both have it.  (You'd think, if both the bride and groom were horrible people, it'd be better to let them marry each other than to potentially ruin the lives of two other people, but apparently the old lady didn't see it that way.)

So I'm watching all this, aghast, and I had this sudden thought.  "This is so weird.  When does this ever happen in real life?  I must be dreaming."

I looked around, assessing the surroundings, and then kind of poked myself in the chest with my finger, and thought, "Huh.  I guess it's real after all.  How strange."

Doesn't it just figure?  I have my one and only opportunity to lucid dream, and when the time came to figure out if I was dreaming, I got the wrong answer.

Dickens's Dream by Robert Buss (1875) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The subject comes up because of a study led by Karen Konkoly, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, which describes research done into people having lucid dreams -- and the potential for communicating with dreamers and having them answer questions or even follow simple commands.

The authors write:

Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience.  These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained.  Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming.  Here we show that individuals who are asleep and in the midst of a lucid dream (aware of the fact that they are currently dreaming) can perceive questions from an experimenter and provide answers using electrophysiological signals.  We implemented our procedures for two-way communication during polysomnographically verified rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep in 36 individuals.  Some had minimal prior experience with lucid dreaming, others were frequent lucid dreamers, and one was a patient with narcolepsy who had frequent lucid dreams.  During REM sleep, these individuals exhibited various capabilities, including performing veridical perceptual analysis of novel information, maintaining information in working memory, computing simple answers, and expressing volitional replies.  Their responses included distinctive eye movements and selective facial muscle contractions, constituting correctly answered questions on 29 occasions across 6 of the individuals tested.  These repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be interrogated in real time.  This relatively unexplored communication channel can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.

It's a cool finding, but not that surprising when you think about it.  A lot of us have had experiences where outside (i.e. real) sounds have become incorporated into our dreams.  My wife once had a dream of hearing NPR, but when she checked, it wasn't coming from our stereo speakers.  So she wandered around the house, and finally found that it was coming from the microwave.  But unplugging the microwave still didn't shut off the news broadcast, and she proceeded to go from appliance to appliance, trying to figure out why our house had the ghostly voices of Doualy Xaykaothao and Ofebia Quist-Arcton and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson coming out of nowhere.

Then she woke up, and found that her clock radio was on, and the news broadcast had become incorporated into her dream state.

Which, of course, brings up another, and more pressing question: why do NPR reporters have such awesome names?  I don't know anyone in real life who has a name as cool as Kai Ryssdal, Nedda Ulaby, and David Folkenflik.  I wonder if it's a condition of employment?

NPR interviewer: I'm happy to see that you've applied for a job as a reporter here at NPR.  What's your name?

Me:  Gordon Bonnet.

NPR interviewer:  Oh, I'm sorry, that's not nearly cool enough.  Maybe you should see if MSNBC has any openings.

But I digress.

The lucid dreaming experiment definitely is cool, but it does open up some rather scary potential.  One of my favorite novels is Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, which involves a man named George Orr who not only has lucid dreams, his dreams change reality.  If he dreams that there was a plague five years ago that wiped out half the world's population, when he wakes up, that's what's happened.  The problem is, no one realizes the change but him.  When the past changed, everyone's memory changed as well, so George is the only person who recognizes that things are different.  Of course, any psychologist he tries to tell this is going to think he's crazy; the psychologist's memory changed along with everyone else's.  But one psychologist believes him -- and realizes that he can use George's peculiar power to reshape the world as he sees fit, by giving George suggestions while he's sleeping.

After that, things go downhill fast.

While the dream-changing-reality ability in LeGuin's incredibly inventive story isn't real, you have to wonder if other things might be.  Could a suggestion during a lucid dream change your memories, or create a memory of something that never happened?  Could it be used to overcome psychological issues like phobias -- or induce aversions where there were none previously?  Any time I hear about people trying to tap into the subconscious mind, it always gives me pause -- because being subconscious, we would very likely be at the mercy of whoever is controlling the experiment, just like the unfortunate George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven.

In any case, it's a compelling study about a topic I've always found fascinating.  As Konkoly et al. point out, we still don't know why people -- and apparently, other animals -- dream, but its ubiquity suggests that it serves some important purpose.  Not only that, we know that blocking REM sleep fairly quickly leads to hallucinations and psychotic symptoms, so whatever dreaming is doing for us, it's evidently critical for our mental health.

The Konkoly et al. study is only a first foray into this topic, so I'll be looking for more research springboarding off their findings.  I'm wondering if it might be possible for people who don't lucid dream to learn how.  I've seen advertisements for devices that are supposed to clue in the sleeper that (s)he is dreaming, and allow for learning how to control the internal dream state -- one I recall is a headband with an LED that activates when you go into REM -- but I haven't seen any particularly convincing evidence that they work.  It'd be cool if they did, though.  I'd love to learn to lucid dream.  Think of the fun you could have!  To start with, I could have told the old lady in the cathedral to shut up and sit down.  That'd have been nice, at least as a start.

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 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Dream weavers

Hard-nosed science types like myself are often criticized by the paranormal enthusiasts for setting too high a bar for what we'll accept as evidence.  The supernatural world, they say, doesn't come when called, is highly sensitive to the mental states of people who are nearby, and isn't necessarily going to be detectable to scientific measurement devices.  Also, since a lot of the skeptics come into the discussion with a bias toward disbelief, they'll be likely to discount any hard evidence that does arise as a hoax or misinterpretation of natural phenomena.

Which, as I've mentioned before, is mighty convenient.  It seems to boil down to, "It exists, and you have to believe because I know it exists."  And I'm sorry, this simply isn't good enough.  If there are real paranormal phenomena out there, they should be accessible to the scientific method.  Such claims should stand or fall on the basis of evidence, just like any other proposed model of how things work.

The problem becomes more difficult with the specific claim of precognition/clairvoyance -- the idea that some of us (perhaps all of us) are capable of predicting the future, either through visions or dreams.  The special difficulty with this realm of the paranormal world is that a dream can't be proven to be precognitive until after the event it predicts actually happens; before that, it's just a weird dream, and you would have no particular reason to record it for posterity.  And given the human propensity for hoaxing, not to mention the general plasticity of memory, a claim that a specific dream was precognitive is inadmissible as evidence after the event in question has occurred.  It always reminds me of the quote from the 19th century Danish philosopher and writer, Søren Kierkegaard: "The tragedy of life is that it can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards."

This double-bind has foiled any attempts to study precognition... until now.  According to an article in Vice, a man named Hunter Lee Soik is attempting to create the world's largest database of dreams, in the hopes that the evidence from it will establish once and for all that clairvoyance exists.

Soik is the man behind Shadow, an app for recording your dreams.  You enter them into the app upon waking, and they are timestamped and placed in a worldwide dream database.  The database software is able to identify keywords; what Soik is hoping is that prior to major world events, there will be a spike in keywords relating to those events.  And given that the transcripts are timestamped, such spikes (should they occur) would be incontrovertible evidence that precognition, or at the very least some kind of collective consciousness, is occurring while people are asleep.

[image courtesy of photographer Rachel Calamusa and the Wikimedia Commons]

"(W)hat happens if we can start looking at precognitive dreams, and say, 'Oh, there are actually correlations that are happening in real time?'" Soik asks.  "If we had this data back during 9/11, we could point to a time-stamped audio file describing the dream that predates the actual event. So, how could you then refute that kind of hard data?"

Which certainly is approaching the question the right way.  My only concern is that the keywords would be specific enough, and the spikes analyzed for statistical significance.  Even if you accept particular accounts of dreams as true, the difficulty is that humans have dreams about a rather narrow range of things -- some of the more common ones reported are dreams of being chased, of falling, of death (either our own or of someone we know), of sex, of being naked, of being lost.  To represent an actual signal -- evidence of precognition -- you would have to establish (for example) that a statistically-significant spike in dreams about death had a direct relationship to a particular violent occurrence in the world, and wasn't just representing an upsurge in anxiety over the state of things.

But like I said: Shadow, and its creator Soik, seem to be taking the correct approach.  I do wish, however, that Soik wouldn't sail off into the ether so regularly, because it doesn't do anything for his credibility.  In his Vice interview, he states that precognition is like Schrödinger's Cat (a comparison that escapes me completely) and goes on to say, "Who else is dreaming what you're dreaming, for example?  I really believe a lot in quantum field mechanics.  And I believe that a lot of the science jargon [means] simply: If you're happy, and you hang out with someone, you make them happy, and they make someone else happy."

To which I respond:  (1) No, that is not what the science says.  (2) What the fuck does this even mean?

Be that as it may, I encourage any of my readers who are interested in contributing to get the Shadow app (you can download it from the link I included above).  The bigger the database, the easier it will be to establish whether any data generated is statistically significant.  And it would be nice to have a wide variety of people involved with contributing dream data, not just the woo crowd that usually gravitates toward such endeavors.

I'm thinking of doing it myself.  I could include last night's dream, which was about a state senator from Alaska who accidentally chopped my dog's tail off, and whom I was trying to talk into paying me $10,000 in damages for the mental anguish she was experiencing, because she could no longer wag to express "I'm happy" and "Oh, look, a squirrel," which seem to be the two most sophisticated concepts her lone functioning brain cell is capable of processing.

I wonder what world event that might be predicting?

Dream weavers

All my life, I've been plagued with vivid dreams.  I use the word "plagued" deliberately, because more often than not my dreams are disturbing, chaotic, and odd, leaving me unsettled upon waking.  I remember more than once thrashing about so violently during a dream that I've found myself in the morning on the floor in a heap of blankets; I've also had the residuum of unease from a bad dream stay with me through much of the following day.  And given that I've also spent most of my adult life fighting chronic insomnia, it's a wonder I get any sleep at all.

Of course, I've also had good dreams.  A series of flying dreams I had as a child were so realistic, and so cool, that for a while I was convinced that they were true; that I could go into my parents' front yard, angle my body to the wind, and be caught up and thrown into the air like a kite.  I've had dreams of running effortlessly, dreams of winning the lottery, and the inevitable (but admittedly pleasant) dreams of the non-PG-13-rated variety.

Through it all, though, I've never had a lucid dream.  Lucid dreams are dreams in which you are aware you're dreaming -- and apparently, with some people, dreams in which you are able to control what happens.  If such a thing were commonplace, who would need virtual reality or computer games, when every night you could create your own reality and then interact with it as if it were real?

The first step toward making such a thing possible for ordinary schmoes like myself, who dream frequently but never lucidly, may just have hit the market.  Called "Remee," the product looks like a sleep mask, but on the inside of the mask are six red LED lights.  Even with your eyelids closed, your eyes receive enough light to remain aware of your surroundings, and when the lights activate -- late in the sleep cycle, when you are most likely to be in REM (Rapid Eye Movement, the stage of sleep in which you dream) -- your brain becomes aware of them.  At that point (so the theory goes), your perception of the red lights becomes a signal, alerting you to the fact that you're dreaming.  From there, the lucid dream is initiated.

So, the lights act a little like the totem objects in Inception -- giving you an anchor, something that clues you in with regards to what is going on.  But unlike the totem objects, whose purpose was to check to see if you were dreaming so you could get out, if need be, here the purpose is to let you know that the fun is about to begin.

The inventors of Remee, Duncan Frazier and Steven McGuigan, told The Daily Mail (read the story here) that their tests have indicated that the lights are unlikely to cause seizures or any other ill effects.  If they fire during non-REM sleep, for example, the brain simply ignores them -- as it does if a faint light (say the distant headlights of a car) shine briefly into your bedroom window at night.

Remee masks are priced at $95 each, and are available here.  Frazier and McGuigan report that since Remee masks first came on the market, they've received over 7,000 orders.

Me, I find this intriguing, but I do wonder about what long-term (possibly psychological) effects such a thing might have, as we still don't have much of an idea what dreaming actually does.  That dreams are important seems obvious, given their ubiquity amongst mammal species -- both of my dogs clearly dream, apparently about chasing squirrels judging by how their feet move and the little muffled woofing noises they make.  Features that are widespread amongst many different, distantly-related species are called evolutionarily conserved features, and the usual interpretation is that they have been maintained through evolutionary history because they serve some sort of essential purpose.  As such, you have to question the wisdom of monkeying around with something like dreaming until we know more about it.

Be that as it may, if I had a Remee mask, I'd definitely try it.  Whatever harm it might do, I would guess, is unlikely to happen from occasional use.  And if you decide to get one, do let me know by posting here what your results are.  Given the unsettling nature of many of my nightly forays into the dream world, it might be nice to have a strategy for taking charge and having a little fun.