Companies are trying to inject ads into people's sleeps
A group of researchers are sounding the alarm over the increasing
frequency of experiments to introduce advertising into consumers'
sleeps. Many schoolchildren and students tried to control their
sleeps in preparation for exams to consolidate the material they
had passed in their sleeps. Such efforts have met with some success
in scientific laboratories. Now the brands Xbox, Coors, Burger
King are teaming up with some scientists to "implant" their ads in
the sleeps of consumers through videos and sound clips, writes
Science magazine (
https://bit.ly/3FURbje).
A group of 40 sleep researchers posted an online letter
(
https://bit.ly/3xD3Owq) calling for the regulation of commercial
sleep manipulation. Advertising sleep incubation is not a fun trick,
but a slippery slope with real consequences. Our sleeps cannot
become another platform for corporate advertisers, the authors warn.
The fact is that modern science has opened up a whole new world
of possibilities. Researchers can now determine when most people
enter the sleep stage in which most sleeps appear. It is also called
REM sleep, which can be tracked by monitoring brain waves, eye
movements, and even snoring.
Experiments have shown that external stimuli such as sounds, smells,
light and speech can alter the content of sleeps. And in 2021,
researchers were able to communicate directly with lucid sleepers -
people who know they are asleep. They answered scientists' questions
and solved math problems in their sleep.
"People are especially vulnerable to suggestion during sleep," says
MIT cognitive scientist and open letter co-author Adam Haar. He
invented a glove that monitors sleep patterns and helps wearers to
sleep the desired sleeps by playing audible cues when the sleeper
reaches the receptive sleep stage. Haar says he has been contacted
by three companies in the past 2 years, including Microsoft and
two airlines, asking for help with sleep incubation projects. The
scientist agreed to help with one game project, but according to
him, he refused any advertising campaigns.
The work of Harvard University sleep researcher Deirdre Barrett has
also caught the attention of companies. She conducted her research
with 66 college students who attended sleeps classes. They were
asked to choose a problem of personal or academic significance,
write it down, and think about it before going to bed for a week.
At the end of the study, nearly half of the students reported having
had sleeps related to the problem they recorded. A similar paper
was also published in Science, in which Harvard neuroscientists
asked people to play Tetris before bed for three days. As it turned
out, just over 60% of players reported having had sleeps about the
game.
University of Montreal dream researcher Tore Nielsen, who did not
sign the open letter, believes his colleagues have a legitimate
concern. But he also stresses that such intervention will not work
if the dreamer is not aware of the manipulation and does not want
to participate.
