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Medicine Science

Electric Stimulation Could Help You Control Your Dreams 138

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "A new study suggests that mild current applied to the scalp while sleeping can help people become aware of, and even control, their dreams—a phenomenon called lucid dreaming. Researchers recruited 27 men and women to spend several nights in a German sleep lab. After the volunteers had plunged into REM sleep, a state in which people are unable to move and the most vividly recalled dreams occur, researchers applied electrical current to their skulls near the forehead and temples. This boosted neural activity in the frontotemporal cortex, a brain region associated with conscious self-awareness, which normally gets tamped down during REM. Researchers then woke the participants and asked them to detail any dreams they could remember. People who had received 40 Hz of current were lucid in more than 70% of their reported dreams. The researchers suggest that the technique could potentially be used to help people who suffer from chronic nightmares."
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Electric Stimulation Could Help You Control Your Dreams

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  • TDCs (Score:4, Informative)

    by h5inz ( 1284916 ) on Monday May 12, 2014 @08:43AM (#46978177)
    It is called tDCS and it has already formed an amateur community, search in Reddit for example, many have bought their devices and many of them have made them themselves. If you are going to try this, then do your research and try to be safe. There are safety guidelines made by some guy here for example:
    http://speakwisdom.wordpress.c... [wordpress.com]
    Also there was a study on rats which found that :"Brain lesions occurred at a current density of 142.9 A/m2 for durations greater than 10 minutes."
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19403329
    Exceeding recommended current will probably give you skin burns long before you reach anything brain damaging. Don't get me wrong though, I don't recommend you anything and I am not a doctor either.

And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones

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