This is the popular-press writeup of a paper out in Science on using EEG to try to decode dreams. In practice, it’s less sexy and useful than it sounds: “They could identify the type of object a subject had seen: it could predict that a man had dreamt about a car, not that he’d been cruising around in a Maserati. And the decoder only worked when the researchers gave it a pair of possible objects to chose from (whether it was a man or a chair, for example).”.

Will technology like this grow incrementally better to the point where it truly reaches ‘mind reading’? Or is the information collected to poor and the complexities of thought to subtle to ever allow this to progress beyond trivial and constrained types of decoding?