12 Feb 2022

Prof Robert Stickgold: how advertisers want to hack our dreams

From Saturday Morning, 10:35 am on 12 February 2022

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but marketing companies are now exploring the potential of advertising their products to us while we sleep. New technology created by scientists at MIT uses ‘targeted dream incubation’ to affect dream content, with the goal of  being used for therapeutic purposes.

However, a recently conducted Future of Marketing study in America found that 77 percent of marketers aim to deploy dream-tech for advertising in the next three years. 

Robert Stickgold says this type of dream hacking could have consequences on how we function psychologically. Stickgold is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. 

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Photo: Anna Olivella

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