- [Laura] They are communicating to us from a dream.
- [Narrator] You're about to see three groundbreaking
experiments.
- When they woke up they were actually
less inclined to smoke.
- That reveal not only how hidden parts
of your mind can control your decisions.
- Seven times that happened.
I thought it happened twice.
- [Narrator] But also how scientists can manipulate
your preferences, desires and habits
without you even being aware.
So how do they do it?
- Inception.
- [Narrator] Like in the movie inception
they do it by sneaking ideas into people's brains
and by manipulating dreams.
What you're about to see may make you question
what or who really controls your decisions.
Before getting to dream control,
do you even control your decisions when you're awake?
Moran Cerf is a former hacker and these days
he hacks the brain as a neuroscientist.
He's attempting to implant an idea,
a preference into these volunteers minds
without them being aware it's happening.
And while he does it, he monitors their brain
with a device called an electroencephalogram or EEG.
- The experiment is gonna ask you to make a
repeated decision.
Each trial is gonna have the following stages.
First, you're gonna see the choice two options.
Then you're gonna make a choice, left or right.
And then we're gonna ask you to explain to us.
- She looks extremely intelligent.
- And the other one seemed a little bit more sad.
- She looked like somebody who was fun and friendly.
- [Narrator] After the participant makes several decisions
Cerf does something a little tricky.
Pay close attention.
The subject chooses the woman with the lighter hair
on the right side but five seconds later
when the card flips over he's presented
with the picture of the woman that was on the left.
- I like this person's dimples.
- [Narrator] Not only does he not remember that
that wasn't the person he originally picked,
a phenomenon called choice blindness,
but he also comes up with a reason
for why he did pick that person.
So could this actually change who he prefers in the future?
- Part two, almost the same just without
the need to explain.
- [Narrator] Now, when faced with the identical decision
will his preference be the same or different?
This time he chose the woman on the left.
It appears that without him being aware
his preference has successfully been changed.
The EEG gives Cerf a clue to what's happening
in the subjects brains.
- So the way we think about is that there are
in your brain cells that code value
or they code preferences.
So you imagine you have to choose between a steak
and a fish, and you're about to make a choice.
The fish cells on the left side of your brain
are starting to fire indicating we want fish.
At the same time the cells on the right
are starting to fire indicating we want the steak.
And there's kind of a battle between those two.
Then at some point there's enough majority from one side
or the other then information gets sent to you,
the conscious you and says fish
not knowing that under the hood
there was an entire battle going on.
- [Narrator] This unconscious battle impacts
how your brain actually decides
between different foods, different videos, different faces.
But by explaining a false choice
that creates a false memory which influences this battle
in one direction versus the other.
Every once in a while they'd actually catch the switch.
- I chose the other one.
- I think I chose the other one.
- I thought I chose the other image.
- [Narrator] But most of the time
this switch does go unnoticed.
- Probably more the eyes on this one.
- [Narrator] And it doesn't just work with faces.
- It works to an extent with choices that we think
are not just arbitrary and small
but ones that define who we are like political choices.
So you can't easily take a Democrat
and make them into a Republican or vice versa
but you can definitely take a person
who says that they're scoring say nine
on how liberal they and in a small manipulation
make them shift to scoring six.
- [Narrator] But for someone to dramatically change
your habits or even addictions, your memories may need
to be even more vulnerable to manipulation.
- We can actually find moments in your life
where your guards are down.
One of those moments is when we're sleeping.
- [Narrator] A study was done by a research group
at Israel's Weizmann Institute.
They took habitual smokers and asked them to track
how much they smoke over a particular week.
Then at the end of that week they asked the smokers
to come into the lab for a night of sleep.
Then over the following week they tracked
how much they smoked again.
It turned out that over that following week
they smoked significantly less.
So what happened to the smokers when they slept in the lab?
It all comes down to what they smelled during the night.
- Laura Shanahan is a neuroscientist
at Northwestern University who does similar research
studying sleep and odors.
- Sleep is really important for consolidating our memories.
What if we could actually go in and manipulate that process.
The sense of smell is often a really underappreciated sense.
- [Narrator] So when the smokers in this study slept
in the lab they were equipped with an odor delivery system
and an EEG to track what stage of sleep they were in.
- When they fell asleep researchers
presented two different smells to their noses repetitively.
The cigarette smoke and the smell of rotten eggs.
They had no idea that they had smelled these smells
during sleep.
- [Narrator] Without the out their awareness
their sleeping brains by a somewhat mysterious process
associated cigarette smell with the rotten egg smell
and as a result...
- They were less inclined to smoke cigarettes
for the following week.
- [Narrator] Laura was intrigued by research
like the Israeli study and wanted to understand
the mechanism that makes such a powerful transformation
during sleep possible.
- What we wanted to understand was what happens
in your brain when you smell an odor during sleep?
- [Narrator] She designed to study were in the subjects
played a simple memory game involving pictures
of animals, buildings, faces, and tools.
- [Laura] They were learning the locations
of these pictures on a four by four grid.
- [Narrator] Before their memories of those locations
were tested they were hooked up to a machine
that delivers odors to their noses.
- Most of us have a particular scent that evokes
a very specific memory.
In our study we decided to take advantage of this system.
So for instance, they might learn that
cedar odor belong with pictures of animals
and that rose odor was associated with pictures
of buildings.
- [Narrator] So the cedar smell goes with animals,
the scent of roses, buildings.
Then the participants went to sleep in the MRI machine.
During deep sleep Shanahan presented them
with cedar odor but not rose odor.
From the MRI, she could see just how much
the cedar odor reactivated in their brains
images of animals.
Now it was time for the participants to wake up
and take the memory test.
Would that unremembered mental replay of animals
during sleep improve their memories of the animal pictures?
- So people had a better memory
for those locations that were reactivated by odors
during sleep.
- [Narrator] Without knowing why they were better
at remembering the locations of the animal pictures
compared to the building locations.
Similarly in the Israeli study the subject's memories
of smoking and rotten eggs were presumably re-triggered
reducing their desire to smoke.
What's strange though is that these memory manipulations
which can profoundly impact our behavior
only work if the subject is sleeping.
So what if you could actually control the images
that appeared in your sleeping mind?
Professor Ken Paller and Karen Konkoly
are conducting some of the first experiments
in real time two way dream communication.
And the first step is training their subjects
to access their own dream.
- So lucid dreams have been known for a long time.
There a special category of dreams where
the dreamer understands that they're dreaming.
Once you understand that you're dreaming
there's the possibility of controlling
what is happening in the dream.
So lucid dreamers enjoy doing this.
They love to go and fly.
- [Narrator] Before training the subject to lucid dream,
Karen places an EEG on her.
- We can use EEG to see what stage of sleep somebody is in.
And then we can also use it to see
where they're looking with their eyes.
- In their dream their body is paralyzed
so they're not moving but the eyes are an exception.
- [Narrator] Knowing where they're looking is important
because the subjects aren't asked to say fly
in their dreams, which they might only be able to describe
after waking up, but rather to demonstrate control
of their dreams by having a real-time conversation
with researchers with their eyes from within the dream.
- One way to have a two-way conversation
would be to ask them to solve little math problems.
And we've already agreed on a code for those
where one is moving left right once.
Two is moving twice, three moving three times and so forth.
- [Narrator] Now, the first step in training
is to teach the participant various eye signals.
- If you become lucid in a dream
then you wanna look all the way to your left ear
all the way to the right, all the way left,
all the way to the right as fast as you can.
- [Narrator] Now, the participant goes into the sleep room
which is equipped with a red light
and a speaker so that Karen can communicate with them.
As they get ready to sleep, Karen starts
the second step of training by flashing a faint light
or playing a faint sound over the speaker
followed by directions.
- As you noticed the signal, bring your attention
to your thoughts and notice where your mind has wandered.
- [Narrator] She directs them to practice
what's called a reality check.
- Reality check is when you ask yourself
very sincerely, am I awake or am I dreaming?
- [Narrator] In the movie inception unique objects
called totems were used to distinguish reality
from dreams.
But Ken and Karen have some other tricks
that anyone including you can use to check
if you're in a dream.
- If you study your hands a lot of times in dreams
they become really strange.
- The storyline just is bizarre sometimes
and that's a hint that you're dreaming
and actually not awake.
- If you read something, look away and then read it again,
a lot of times in a dream the words will change.
The best reality check is just to become really
critically aware.
Remain lucid, critically aware and notice how aspects
of this experience are in anyway different
from your normal waking experience.
- [Narrator] After about 20 minutes of similar training
the participant begins to fall asleep.
- When their eyes start moving
and they're completely paralyzed
you know that they're in REM sleep.
- [Narrator] As the subject enters REM sleep,
the phase of sleep where narrative dreams occur,
Karen again softly plays that violin sound
or flashes the dim red light hoping that the subject
will become aware of the signal from within the dream.
- [Subject] I was looking at my old house.
I saw the light cue, that flash kinda like intertwined
with my dream.
- We're waiting for her to give a left right left right
eye signal after one of the light cues
that we give her or one of the violin sounds.
In lucid dreaming, it's certainly true
wherever you're looking in the dream
corresponds to where your eyes are looking
in your waking body.
- [Subject] I acknowledged that there was a light cue.
I was also dreaming at the time same time.
- So now we know, okay, our participant
is having a lucid dream.
So we quietly celebrate.
And then we try to communicate
by giving them an easy math problem.
- [Announcer] Two plus one.
- [Subject] So then I incorporated by like envisioning
the math problem on the house number plate.
- [Narrator] While this is happening,
Karen carefully monitors the EEG
to make sure the subject is still asleep.
One reliable indication that the subject
is still sleeping is a reduction
in electrical signals coming from the chin
confirming that the body is still paralyzed.
- [Subject] I would transform that into the math problem.
- [Narrator] She now signals from her dream
the number three with her eyes.
- It seems like we've successfully communicated.
So we're gonna wake her up and see what she remembers.
- [Narrator] This live dream communication
shows that we actually can control the images
that occur to our malleable sleeping minds.
This opens the door to training ourselves
in our dreams to make better choices.
And it may even help us solve difficult problems
in our lives.
- We're planning to do the same experiment
with problem solving.
If you're struggling with something
you might decide that your lucid dream
would be a good chance to revisit that problem
and see if you can come up with a more creative answer
to that problem.
- [Narrator] So the unconscious forces from your awake
or sleeping mind can really impact your decisions or habits.
But really understanding these forces could change
even more than that.
About 400 years ago, when we began to accept
that we on the earth weren't at the center
of the solar system, a revolution in the understanding
of the universe began.
- Our coming years will allow us to explore
not just the conscious us, but other parts
if we begin to understand that we are not the center
of our own universe.
In understanding that we will not only uncover
a lot of things about how we think,
how we decide, how emotions work, how dreams work,
how memories work; but we'll understand essentially
how all of those become what we call me.