A recent article at the widely ready site www.slate.com gives coverage about a brain-zapping startup called Prophetic. The article is entitled "It Uses A.I. It Goes on Your Head. Can It Induce Lucid Dreams?" But on the site the headline leading you to the article sounds more encouraging, saying, "They Raised $1 Million for a Device That Gives You Lucid Dreams. There’s Just One Problem." We read, "Within just four months, Wollberg and Berry’s new company, Prophetic, raised more than $1 million in funding for a consumer device—the 'Halo'—from venture capital heavy hitters and acquired advisers who’d worked in neurotech at Apple."
We get a visual of a head device that the company Prophetic is developing, one that it claims will be able to give you lucid dreams. Lucid dream are dreams in which you are aware that you are dreaming. Supposedly lucid dreams can be quite pleasurable for certain people who are able to steer the dreams towards desired content. You can imagine how fun it would be, for example, to will your dream to show you naked movie stars, or maybe will your dreams towards some scene in which you are swimming in a beautiful lagoon in Tahiti.
I have little doubt that if a head device caused you to start lucid dreaming, it might be highly profitable. But is there evidence that zapping the brain with some energy can help produce lucid dreams?
Both the Slate article and the website of Prophetic showcase a 2014 study by Voss and others entitled "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity." That paper appears at the top of the "Lucid Dreaming Research" page at the website of Prophetic:
The Slate article says this about the 2014 Voss paper, claiming an increase in lucid dreams after zapping brains at a frequency of about 40 Hz:
"That study found that it was possible to induce lucid dreams using electric currents. Wollberg and Berry plan to build a headset that utilizes a different kind of 'noninvasive neurostimulation'—a transcranial focused ultrasound. This emerging technology activates highly specific regions of the brain, through the skull, using high-frequency sound waves."
We hear nothing in the Slate article disputing the 2014 study "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity" by Voss and others. But, very importantly, there was a later study that failed to reproduce their results. The later study was the 2020 study "Attempted induction of signalled lucid dreaming by transcranial alternating current stimulation."
The study concludes this:
"Results do not support the conclusion that frontal 40 Hz tAC stimulation heightens dreamed self-awareness. Our findings further cast doubt on whether 40 Hz frontal brain activity in REM sleep is a reliable index of lucid dreaming as previously claimed (Voss et al., 2014). Not only is our observed lack of an effect of 40 Hz frontal stimulation on lucid dreaming inconsistent with that claim, but other findings similarly question it. Specifically, Dodet, Chavez, Leu-Semenescu, Golmard, and Arnulf (2015) did not see distinct 40 Hz activity in frontal regions or any other regions in a sample of 14 lucid dreams from 7 patients with narcolepsy who were frequent lucid dreamers."
There is no link to this study on the "Lucid Dreaming Research" page on the web site of the Prophetic startup. We get a page that begin with a link to the 2014 Voss study "Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity," but no link to the 2020 study quoted above, one failing to reproduce the results of the 2014 Voss study. Investors should beware of startups offering pages of scientific results on their web sites. The studies mentioned may be cherry-picked.
The writer of the Slate story at least did right by reaching out to two brain experts who are quoted as saying that there is no evidence yet that brain stimulation can produce lucid dreaming. But the Slate story ends by saying this about the Prophetic startup's "Halo" device: "Still, their headset seems more promising than some of the other lucid-dreaming products out there." No justification is given for this dubious claim.
The situation seems to be this:
(1) A 2014 study ("Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity" by Voss and others) claimed that electrical stimulation could help produce lucid dreams.
(2) A 2020 study ("Attempted induction of signalled lucid dreaming by transcranial alternating current stimulation") tried to reproduce the results of the 2014 Voss study, but failed to do so.
(3) The Prophetic startup's "Halo" device does not even use the electrical stimulation technique attempted by the 2014 Voss study that was not replicated by the 2020 study, but a different technique of ultrasound.
(4) There are apparently no studies showing that ultrasound can cause lucid dreaming. None of the seven studies listed on the "Lucid dreaming research" page of the Prophetic startup website refer to ultrasound. The site has another page listing seven studies pertaining to ultrasound, but none of them have titles mentioning dreaming. The site seems to list no scientific paper referring to both ultrasound and dreaming in its title.
(5) Doing a Google Scholar search for "ultrasound and dreaming" seems to show no results (on the first two pages of search results) mentioning any study involving dreaming effects of ultrasound stimulation.
(6) There is no robust evidence that dreaming is produced by the brain, and some evidence that may hint that dreaming is not produced by the brain, as I discuss in my post here. A study cited on the Prophetic web site ("Frequent lucid dreaming associated with increased functional connectivity between frontopolar cortex and temporoparietal association areas") is not robust evidence for a brain involvement in lucid dreaming. Not limited itself to some exact hypothesis by using pre-registration, the study attempted to find some difference in the brains between a small set of lucid dreamers (about 14) and about 14 controls. Since there are 1001 ways to analyze brain features, it is always possible to find differences using brain scans of two groups of about a dozen people. There are countless different ways in which neuroscientists attempt to quantify "brain connectivity."
Before investing in a startup such as Prophetic, I would wait for the appearance of a solid scientific study suggesting that there is reality behind its premise that lucid dreaming can be stimulated by ultrasound.
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