Follow Quartz. These are some of our most ambitious editorial projects. By Katherine Ellen Foley Health and science reporter. Published June 30, Last updated on July 1, This article is more than 2 years old. Sign me up. Update your browser for the best experience. Controlling one's dreams has been possible for centuries -- Tibetean Buddhists practiced it 1, years ago; so did yogis. Nolan himself began practicing lucid dreaming and dream manipulation as a teenager and mined his own dreams to conceive "Inception.
Figuring out what a sleeping person is dreaming about is possible as well. Cognitive neuroscience techniques allow researchers to view three-dimensional brain scans as they happen, and methods of monitoring the subconscious continue to advance. Or the language centers are very active. It's not impossible that we would eventually have some technology to both manage what's going on in a dream and influence what people dream about.
What's more murky is the idea of dream-sharing -- that several people can engage in the same subconscious experience. While groups of dream sharers exist, evidence of dream sharing is more anecdotal than evidential.
Researchers are interested in lucid dreaming because it can help probe what happens when we switch between conscious states, going from little to full awareness. In , Ursula Voss at the J. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and her colleagues trained volunteers to move their eyes in a specific pattern during a lucid dream. By scanning their brains while they slept, Voss was able to show that lucid dreams coincided with elevated gamma brainwaves. This kind of brainwave occurs when groups of neurons synchronise their activity, firing together about 40 times a second.
The gamma waves occurred mainly in areas situated towards the front of the brain, called the frontal and temporal lobes. The team wanted to see whether gamma brainwaves caused the lucid dreams, or whether both were side effects of some other change. Several decades into the future, it's not inconceivable that this tech could become more accurate in revealing the contents of a person's dream.
According to the rules of Inception , taking something from the human mind is much easier than planting it there. Cobb and Arthur are renowned for their ability to steal secrets from a dreamer's subconscious, but the act of inception has only been attempted a handful of times - twice that the audience learns of.
Ironically, the reverse is true in reality - suggesting an idea to the human mind is far simpler than forcibly taking one from it. Inception happens every day when the mind subconsciously and automatically absorbs visual and auditory information. Advertisers take advantage of this by using subliminal messaging to ingrain their product into the consumer's mind, with even small details such as color, font and wording designed to send a specific message that the viewer won't necessarily be aware of, but will still compel them to try that energy drink, or question whether they really do have the best value broadband deal.
The power of suggestion is a key weapon in the arsenal of British performer Derren Brown, who utilizes a combination of suggestion and psychology for his ambitious stunts. In The Push , for example, a PR event is entirely orchestrated around compelling an ordinary member of the public shove a man to his death, and while not all succumb to the intense suggestion, some do.
In another stunt, Brown used subliminal imaging on a group of advertising executives, getting them to come up with an idea eerily similar to one he'd predicted previously.
Although Inception might assert the opposite, the brain is far easier to trick into action than into revealing closely guarded secrets.
But could Cobb use subliminal suggestion to convince Fischer to liquidate his father's corporate empire? Probably not. Various studies into the advertising strategies in a practical context via APS demonstrate that while the technique does work, the effects are usually short-lived and limited in scope.
In other words, you've already got to want a drink before being subliminally influenced to choose a specific brand. Craig first began contributing to Screen Rant in , several years after graduating college, and has been ranting ever since, mostly to himself in a darkened room.
Having previously written for various sports and music outlets, Craig's interest soon turned to TV and film, where a steady upbringing of science fiction and comic books finally came into its own. Craig has previously been published on sites such as Den of Geek, and after many coffee-drenched hours hunched over a laptop, part-time evening work eventually turned into a full-time career covering everything from the zombie apocalypse to the Starship Enterprise via the TARDIS.
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