A couple months ago, CBS’s ‘60 minutes’ did a show about a new form of technology called “Thought Identification”. Through the use of a form of MRI scanning called functional MRI (fMRI), scientists can see the parts of the brain that are active when a person thinks about something like an object or a place. This research is being done by cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, and computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell, at Carnegie Mellon University.

They have found that when a person thinks of a noun, it doesn’t just activate one area of the brain. It also activates the way the nouns are associated with verbs, such as see, hear, listen, and taste. Marcel Just explains “Screwdriver isn’t one place in the brain. It’s many places in the brain. When you think of a screwdriver, you think about how you hold it, how you twist it, what it looks like, what you use it for….And we found that we could identify which object they were thinking about from their brain activation patterns.”

Though different people’s brains are not identical, they are close enough that the computer is able to find the commonalities, and then identify which of these a person is thinking of while they are in the fMRI machine. During the segment, they had a producer from the show try out the machine while thinking of 5 objects and 5 places, and the computer was able to correctly identify what she was thinking of 10 out of 10 times!

I find this information fascinating, and I decided to write about it because I feel that it has a direct correlation to dream work. I talk a lot about the importance of individual associations in dream work, and yet I cannot ignore the fact that there are certain Universal Dream Themes that most of us as human beings share (some examples of these include flying, falling, teeth falling out and being naked in public).  While there can be individual variations  (and I always do like to check this), much research has been done by people like Patricia Garfield and Gillian Holloway on Universal Dreams and it is amazing to find that certain dreams often do hold a similar meaning for most people.  The fact that most of us will have similar areas of the brain ‘light up’ when thinking of a certain object or place, and that we can share a common dream and find a common meaning to it, illustrates the idea that we are all sharing this experience of being human and that perhaps we are more connected than not. When I have the chance I like to check with an individual to see if their associations match the universal interpretation, and interestingly enough they usually do indeed apply.

For more information on the show that featured this story, visit:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/31/60minutes/main4694713.shtml