Via slashdot, I learn that a couple of colleagues of mine have achieved nerd fame with an art project in which a robot acts out dreams.
"Is there video?" you ask. Silly reader! Of course there's video!
The deal here is that one of the two, Fernando Orellana, went to a sleep disorder center and spent a night hooked up to machines that tracked his eye motions and EEG. Then they mapped patterns in the data to specific robot actions, so an eye movemet up and to the left became a lift and turn of the robot's head, for example. Then they play the whole thing back through the robot.
It should be stressed that this is art, not science-- the mapping of brain patterns to actions is pretty arbitrary, so it's not like this is really telling us anything about what goes on in dreams. As Science Art goes, though, it's pretty cool.
Humanities & Social Science
Brain & Behavior
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