Sleep experts and researchers are warning people about a marketing strategy that’s still at a nascent stage – injecting advertisements into dreams. Three researchers from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Montreal published an essay on dream hacking in Aeon.
The essay warns that as per a recent survey, 77 percent of marketers plan to use dream tech advertising in the coming three years. “Multiple marketing studies are openly testing new ways to alter and drive purchasing behavior through sleep and dream hacking,” the team writes. “The commercial, for-profit use of dream incubation — the presentation of stimuli before or during sleep to affect dream content — is rapidly becoming a reality.”
Is hacking of dreams possible?
Two of the essay’s authors previously worked on an MIT device built to communicate with sleeping subjects and even “hack” their dreams, making the case more strong for marketers. They wrote that an ad campaign by Molson Coors offered a free beer for participation in a “dream incubation” study that involves a video with dancing beer cans and talking fish.
Interestingly, the duo pointed that the company used the phrase “targeted dream incubation,” a term coined by two of the three in a 2020 paper, meaning that advertisers are keenly observing academic work on dream hacking. The trio penned an open letter that slammed advertisers trying to hack dreams. Forty scientists signed the document.
Similar to Elon Musk’s brain-reading Neuralink?
“The Coors dream advertisement was not merely a gimmicky marketing campaign; it was a signal that what was once the stuff of science fiction might quickly become our reality,” the researchers wrote in Aeon. “We now find ourselves on a very slippery slope. Where we slide to, and at what speed, depends on what actions we choose to take in order to protect our dreams.”
Previously, cognitive psychologist Susan Schneider slammed Elon Musk’s brain-reading tech Neuralink. The psychologist has been a critic of the technology for years. Back in 2019, she said that implanting an AI in a human brain is similar to suicide. She also believes that a person’s private thoughts and biometric data can be sold to Big Tech.
