Researchers have learned how to manage rat dreams. Maybe the next step - human dreams? Matt Wilson and his colleagues, who several years ago found the opportunity to read rat dreams, now found that dreams rodents in addition, you can manage. Opens up the possibility of scientists and doctors the ability to influence a dream?

That rats can have dreams, like human, scientific community told the world in 2008. Matt Wilson, at the time the employee of the Massachusetts Institute of technology (USA), connect the sensors to the brain sleeping rodents and "overheard", as they think in a dream about his adventures in built psychologist labyrinths. This is the opening wrote the British newspaper The Guardian. "For the first time researchers were able to penetrate into the sleep of animals, " said Wilson. - No one could say for sure that animals see the same dreams as we are, where are reproduced events or at least fragments of events that happened to them when they were awake" - he said.

"We have studied how individual cells to determine the content of the rat dreams. We know now that they really can have dreams, and the dreams to reflect their real experiences" - said the scientist.

Before going to sleep Matt Wilson made the rats running and using MRI watched the activity of their brains while performing different tasks. While running the rat brain passed characteristic pulses to nerve cells in the hippocampus region of the brain associated with memory. Then he and his colleagues observed in rats during sleep, fixing more than 40 fragments of REM sleep. Half of them reflect their actions during wakefulness.

"A century has passed since then, as Freud put forward the theory of operation of the subconscious and regarded the content of dreams as a key to understanding human action, said Wilson. - Now we have the means to explore the world of dreams animals and get a deeper understanding of ourselves".

Studies have shown that people and animals are better perform their tasks, if previously they were trying to find their solution during sleep. Three years later, in 2011, to study the images in the brain cortex of rats during sleep German scientists headed by Professor Hannah Palagina used the scanner of a new generation. First of all, scientists have observed the brain activity of rats during the demonstration of familiar animals incentives: the four-legged fellow, shelters, food, etc.

The second stage of the experiment was to "viewed" dreams rats using the obtained data. As it turned out, rats are interested in problems similar to those that are so concerned person: delicious food, housing, and the struggle for "place in the sun" in the pack. It's funny that even rat dreams't go without incidents and strange fantasies, so well known on human dreams. As proved experiments in dreams one of the males had figured prominently the image of a caring woman who nursed him in the lab. The reason for such a passionate "Hobbies", the scientists cannot explain yet. Do "rats" fell in love?...

And recently, already familiar Matt Wilson has made another step in the study of dreams - he learned to simulate dreams. While at the same rats, but who knows - maybe, it is now up to human dreams? Moreover, dreaming of rats, as we now know, is very similar to human. It turns out that the dream can change under the influence of stimuli from the environment.

Empirically, this phenomenon is probably familiar to everyone who opened the clock and when this bad spilled. In sleep the clock becomes the obsession of music which is not off, the roar zawodowego motorcycle... Now the possibility "simulate" dreams from outside proved experimentally.

On the eve of the night of the experiment Wilson and his assistants trained rats to run through the maze using two excellent audio. One of them meant that food rewards waited rodents left, but another sound was pointed out that rats can find a snack on the right. Scientists recorded brain activity of rodents in the time when they passed through the maze, and later, as they slept. Using the correlative analysis of the records, they confirmed that the rats were dreaming adventures in the maze of food.

But the most interesting thing was found out, when scientists have already lost two friends animal signal, while they slept. Dreams rats have changed! They began to dream that part of the maze (of course, with refreshments), which encodes Sigal. Thus, Wilson and colleagues proved that under the action of external incentives dreams sleep can be changed on the fly, that is a dream - the collective creativity of our consciousness and impulses from the environment. So, if not close the window on a cold night, don't be surprised why seen myself in a dream by polar Explorer on the ice.

Wilson explains that the opportunity to influence the dreams opens wide possibilities. For example, you can use this method in psychotherapy for resurrection suppressed memories. People suffering from the trauma of violence, the death of loved ones, catastrophe, is sometimes forget that experience. Triggers a defense mechanism of the psyche, displacing an unbearable thought.

However, remaining in the subconscious, these memories do not disappear, but still emotionally destroy a person. Therefore, to take them on one of the tasks of the therapist. And here could help "spontaneously called" dreams. For example, a man who survived a car accident and not remembering this event, you could lose in a dream record squeal of brakes and other sounds that accompany the accident, of course, in this volume, that he never woke up.

This "simulated a dream" would help patients to recall the incident and would make the remembrance less traumatic - after all the dreams we relate not so serious as to memories of actual events.

So, let's wait for news from the scientists. Perhaps next time an experiment on the effect on dreams will agree people - and we find out what features are incorporated in the opening Wilson.