By Derek (February 9, 2009) (Technovelgy Group Assignment)

(by Sandra Dávila, Petra Farinha and Derek Chung)

For a restful night’s sleep that recharges and inspires you for the next day, try a Radiante bed – an integrated sleep management system. When you lie down for the night, Radiante emerges above and around your head. Its simple controls allow to you select how long you would like to sleep and how you would like to feel in the morning.  Radiante takes care of the rest – awakening you on time, fresh and happy every day.

As you fall asleep, Radiante monitors your brain waves to capture the images in your brain from your dreams, and responding with evocative scents to enhance and guide your dreams to create memories to uplift your spirits and prepare you for the day ahead. Imagine yourself lifted from where you are in your dream – the office, a crowded street – to the seashore, a mountaintop or the warm kitchen of your childhood. As morning approaches, Radiante gently steers you from your dream with scents of coffee and a morning breeze to wakefulness, refreshed and alert.

 

This invention is based on George O. Smith’s Menslator, which can read your mental images for the purposes of translation, Ray Bradbury’s Odorophonics, which can generate arbitrary smells to evoke the feeling of being in other environments, and Philip Dick’s Extra-Factual Memories, which are memories that are artificially placed in people’s brains.

While Radiante may still be science fiction, there are areas of research that could make it a reality in the future. Recent brain-imaging research is now able to detect when different parts of the brain light up in response to different mental images, thus differentiating when people are thinking of specific things. Likewise, commercial labs are researching how to generate different flavors and scents artificially, for use in perfumes and processed foods. The link between smells and memory is strong, though the idea of influencing dreams through scent is speculative. Applying this technique during sleep and dreams seems plausible, when the mind is more vulnerable to suggestion than during conscious life.

While this “product” is being presented as a mood enhancer, if it were real, it could be used for various beneficial and nefarious persuasive purposes. If you could control people’s dreams and memories, you can make them forget or feel less negatively about traumatic events, but you could also use it to manipulate them to buy certain products, support specific candidates or causes, or otherwise influence their behavior for personal gain.