Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
they're communicating to us
from a dream
you're about to see three groundbreaking
experiments when they woke up they were
actually less inclined to smoke that
reveal not only how hidden parts of your
mind can control your decisions seven
times that happened i thought it
happened twice
but also how scientists can manipulate
your preferences desires and habits
without you even being aware
so how do they do it
like in the movie inception they do it
by sneaking ideas into people's brains
and by manipulating dreams what you're
about to see may make you question what
or who
really controls your decisions
[Music]
before getting to dream control do you
even control your decisions when you're
awake moran surf is a former hacker and
these days he hacks the brain as a
neuroscientist
he's attempting to implant an idea a
preference into these volunteers minds
without them being aware it's happening
and while he does it he monitors their
brain with a device called an
electroencephalogram
or eeg the experiment is going to ask
you to make a repeated decision
each trial is going to have the
following stages first you're gonna see
the choice two options then you're gonna
make a choice left or right and then
we're gonna ask you to explain to us she
looks really intelligent and the other
one seemed a little bit more sad uh she
looked like somebody who was fun and
friendly
after the participant makes several
decisions surf does something a little
tricky
pay close attention the subject chooses
the woman with the lighter hair on the
right side but five seconds later when
the card flips over he's presented with
the picture of the woman that was on the
left
i like this person's dimples not only
does he not remember that that wasn't
the person he originally picked
a phenomenon called choice blindness but
he also comes up with a reason for why
he did pick that person
so could this actually change who he
prefers in the future part 2 almost the
same just without the need to explain
now when faced with the identical
decision will his preference be the same
or
[Music]
different this time he chose the woman
on the left it appears that without him
being aware his preference has
successfully been changed
the eeg gives surf a clue to what's
happening in the subject's brains so the
way we think about it is that there are
in your brain
cells that code value or the code
preferences so imagine you have to
choose between a steak
and a fish and you're about to make a
choice the fish cells on the left side
of your brain are starting to fire
indicating we want fish
at the same time the cells on the right
are starting to fire indicating we want
the steak and there's kind of a battle
between those two and at some point
there's enough
majority from one side rather than the
other then information gets sent to you
the conscious you and says
fish not knowing that under the hood
there was an entire battle going on this
unconscious battle impacts how your
brain actually decides between different
foods different videos different faces
but by explaining a false choice that
creates a false memory which influences
this battle in one direction versus the
other
every once in a while they'd actually
catch the switch i chose the other one
i think i chose the other one thought i
chose the other but most of the time the
switch does go unnoticed
uh
probably more the
eyes on this one and it doesn't just
work with faces it works to an extent
with choices that we think are not just
arbitrary and small but ones that define
who we are like political choices
so you can't easily take a democrat and
make it a republican or vice versa but
you can definitely take a person who
says that they're scoring say nine on
how liberal they are
and in a small manipulation make them
shift to scoring six
but for someone to dramatically change
your habits or even addictions your
memories may need to be even more
vulnerable to manipulation we can
actually find moments in your life where
your gods are down one of those moments
is
when we're sleeping a study was done by
a research group at israel's weitzman
institute they took habitual smokers and
asked them to track how much they smoked
over a particular week
then at the end of that week they asked
the smokers to come into the lab for a
night of sleep then over the following
week they tracked how much they smoked
again it turned out that over that
following week they smoked significantly
less
so what happened to the smokers when
they slept in the lab
it all comes down to what they smelled
during the night laura shanahan is a
neuroscientist at northwestern
university who does similar research
studying sleep and odors
sleep is really important for
consolidating our memories what if we
could actually go in and manipulate that
process the sense of smell is often a
really underappreciated sense so when
the smokers in this study slept in the
lab they were equipped with an odor
delivery system and an eeg to track what
stage of sleep they were in when they
fell asleep researchers presented two
different smells their noses
repetitively cigarette smoke and the
smell of rotten eggs they had no idea
they had smelled these smells during
sleep without their awareness their
sleeping brains by a somewhat mysterious
process associated cigarette smell with
the rotten egg smell and as a result
they were less inclined to smoke
cigarettes for the following week
laura was intrigued by research like the
israeli study and wanted to understand
the mechanism that makes such a powerful
transformation during sleep possible
what we wanted to understand was what
happens in your brain when you smell an
odor during sleep she designed a study
wherein the subjects played a simple
memory game involving pictures of
animals buildings faces and tools they
were learning the locations of these
pictures on a 4x4 grid
before their memories of those locations
were tested they were hooked up to a
machine that delivers odors to their
noses
most of us have a particular scent that
evokes a very specific memory in our
study we decided to take advantage of
the system so for instance they might
learn that cedar odor belong with
pictures of animals and that rose odor
was associated with pictures of
buildings so the cedar smell goes with
animals the scent of roses buildings
then the participants went to sleep in
the mri machine
during deep sleep shanahan presented
them with cedar odor but not rose odor
from the mri she could see just how much
the cedar odor reactivated in their
brains images of animals
now it was time for the participants to
wake up and take the memory test would
that unremembered mental replay of
animals during sleep improve their
memories of the animal pictures so
people had a better memory for those
locations that were reactivated by odors
during sleep without knowing why they
were better at remembering the locations
of the animal pictures compared to the
building locations
similarly in the israeli study the
subject's memories of smoking and rotten
eggs were presumably re-triggered
reducing their desire to smoke
what's strange though is that these
memory manipulations which can
profoundly impact our behavior
only work if the subject is sleeping so
what if you could actually control the
images that appear in your sleeping mind
professor ken pauler
and karen concoli are conducting some of
the first experiments in real-time
two-way dream communication and the
first step is training their subjects to
access their own dreams so lucid dreams
have been known for a long time there
are a special category of dreams where
the dreamer understands that they're
dreaming once you understand that you're
dreaming there's a possibility of
controlling what is happening in the
dream so lucid dreamers enjoy doing this
they love to go and fly
before training the subject to lucid
dream karen places an eeg on her we can
use eg to see what stage of sleep
somebody's in and then we can also use
it to see where they're looking with
their eyes in their dream their body is
paralyzed so they're not moving but the
eyes are an exception knowing where
they're looking is important because the
subjects aren't asked to say fly in
their dreams which they might only be
able to describe after waking up but
rather to demonstrate control of their
dreams by having a real-time
conversation with researchers with their
eyes from within the dream one way to
have a two-way conversation would be to
ask them to solve little math problems
and we've already agreed on a code for
those where one is moving left right
once two is moving twice three moving
three times and so forth now the first
step in training is to teach the
participant various eye signals
if you become lucid in a dream then you
want to look all the way to your left
ear all the way to the right all the way
left all the way right as fast as you
can
now the participant goes into the sleep
room which is equipped with a red light
and a speaker so that karen can
communicate with them as they get ready
to sleep karen starts the second step of
training by flashing a faint light or
playing a faint sound over the speaker
followed by directions
as you notice the signal bring your
attention to your thoughts
and notice where your mind has wandered
she directs them to practice what's
called a reality check reality check is
when you ask yourself very sincerely am
i awake or am i dreaming
in the movie inception unique objects
called totems were used to distinguish
reality from dreams
but ken and karen have some other tricks
that anyone including you can use to
check if you're in a dream if you study
your hands a lot of times in dreams they
become really strange
the storyline just is bizarre sometimes
and that's a hint that you're dreaming
and actually not awake if you read
something look away and then read it
again a lot of times in a dream the
words will change
the best reality check is just to become
really critically aware
remain lucid
critically aware
and notice how aspects of this
experience
are in any way different from your
normal waking experience
after about 20 minutes of similar
training the participant begins to fall
asleep when their eyes start moving and
they're completely paralyzed you know
that they're in rem sleep as the subject
enters rem sleep the phase of sleep
where narrative dreams occur
karen again softly plays that violin
sound or flashes the dim red light
hoping that the subject will become
aware of the signal from within the
dream
i was looking at my old house i saw the
light cue that flash kind of like
intertwined with my dream
we're waiting for her to give a left
right left right eye signal after one of
the light cues that we give her or one
of the violin sounds
in lucid dreaming it's certainly true
wherever you're looking in the dream
corresponds to where your eyes are
looking
in your waking body i acknowledged that
there was a light cue
i was also dreaming at the same time so
now we know okay our participants having
a lucid dream so we quietly celebrate
and then we try to communicate by
giving them an easy math problem two
plus one so then i incorporated by like
envisioning the math problem on the
house number plate while this is
happening karen carefully monitors the
eeg to make sure the subject is still
asleep one reliable indication that the
subject is still sleeping is a reduction
in electrical signals coming from the
chin confirming that the body is still
paralyzed
i would
transform that into the math problem she
now signals from her dream the number
three with her eyes
it seems like we've successfully
communicated so we're gonna wake her up
and see what she remembers
this live dream communication shows that
we actually can control the images that
occur to our malleable sleeping minds
this opens the door to training
ourselves in our dreams to make better
choices and it may even help us solve
difficult problems in our lives we're
planning to do the same experiment with
problem solving if you're struggling
with something you might
decide that your lucid dream would be a
good chance to revisit that problem and
see if you can come up with a more
creative answer to that problem so the
unconscious forces from your awake or
sleeping mind can really impact your
decisions or habits
but really understanding these forces
could change even more than that about
400 years ago when we began to accept
that we on the earth weren't at the
center of the solar system a revolution
in the understanding of the universe
began
our coming years will allow us to
explore not just the consciousness but
the other parts
if we begin to understand that we are
not the center of our own universe
in understanding that we will not only
uncover
a lot of things about how we think how
we decide how emotions work how dreams
work how memories work but we understand
essentially
how all of those become what we call me
you