'I love you': the first phrase detected from dreams.
Sleep science (Sao Paulo, Brazil) – January 01, 2022
Source: PubMed
Summary
Lucid dreaming may unlock the secrets of our subconscious. In a study involving four lucid dream practitioners, facial muscle activity was recorded while they vocalized the phrase "I love you" both awake and during dreams. Remarkably, all participants successfully demonstrated this at least once. Specific patterns emerged: the word "I" consistently activated muscles in the submentalis area, while "you" triggered activity in the orbicularis oris. These findings suggest that decoding dream speech could become possible, paving the way for an artificial EMG language in lucid states.
Abstract
Many people have dreams nightly and some maintain consciousness during dreams. Such dreams are referred to as lucid dreams (LD). During dreams, our speech correlates with facial muscle activity, which is hard to decode, but LD could solve this problem. The primary hypothesis of this study was that the facial muscles electric activity during LD corresponds to specific sounds. Understanding this connection could help decode dream speech in the future. Under laboratory conditions, four LD practitioners were asked to say "I love you", a phrase with a distinctive electromyographic (EMG) signature. They did this before falling asleep and then again after becoming conscious during a dream. Their facial and neck EMG was recorded in four areas. All four volunteers accomplished the goal at least once. The patterns associated with the "I love you" phrase were observed in most cases, both during wakefulness and LD. Specifically, the "I" triggered distinctive phasic activity in the submentalis area most of the time, while "you" did the same in the orbicularis oris. This study highlights the possibility of detecting only specific and highly EMG distinctive phrases from dreams because vocalization also involves a tong and vocal apparatus. The most interesting consequence of the present results is that they indicate the possibility of creating an artificial EMG language that could be instantly decoded in reality and used during LD.