The Halo
The Halo is designed to induce lucid dreams through dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activation during naturally occuring dreams by utilizing emerging technologies such as transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) and generative transformer architectures, along with established technologies like electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
Neuroscience
When we have a naturally occuring dream, our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex decreases in activity. The dlPFC is responsible for higher-order functions like decision-making, self-awareness, and logical thinking.
A lucid dream is a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming. During a lucid dream, individuals often have some degree of control over the dream's environment, characters, narrative, and their own actions. This awareness can allow the dreamer to explore the dream world with conscious intention, manipulate aspects of the dream, or simply observe it with a sense of curiosity.
Unlike regular dreams, the dlPFC in the brain becomes more active during lucid dreaming, which is thought to contribute to the heightened self-awareness and reasoning abilities present in these dreams.
Neuromodulation
Transcranial Focused Ultrasound (tFUS) is an emerging non-invasive neuromodulation technology that utilizes ultrasonic waves that are focused to precisely target areas within the brain. tFUS can stimulate neuronal activity by modulating the membrane potential of neurons, making them more likely to fire action potentials. This effect can activate specific neural circuits in a targeted region.
This precision is crucial since the dlPFC's involvement is key to inducing lucid dreaming. By carefully controlling the stimulation parameters, tFUS can activate the dlPFC during REM sleep, creating conditions conducive to lucidity.
Prophetic designs and engineers state-of-the-art multielement transducer arrays with fibonacci spirals to maximize steering range and holography generation.
Neuroimaging
Electroencephalography (EEG) and functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) are non-invasive techniques used to monitor brain activity.
EEG measures the electrical activity of the brain. It is primarily used to monitor neural oscillations (brain waves) that indicate different mental states, such as sleep, attention, or relaxation. Increases in frequency and amplitude indicate increases in neural activity.
fNIRS measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood oxygenation. It relies on the principle that active brain regions consume more oxygen, leading to changes in the concentration of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin.
Morpheus Transformer Architecture
Morpheus is a class of ultrasonic generative neural transformer models designed by Prophetic. We call it Morpheus because, in Greek mythology, Morpheus is the god of dreams. He is often depicted as a messenger of the gods, delivering messages through dreams, particularly those related to human emotions and experiences.
Unlike Large Language Models, Morpheus-1 is not prompted with words and sentences but rather brain states. And instead of generating words, Morpheus-1 generates ultrasonic holograms for neurostimulation to bring one to a lucid state. Morpheus-1 is a 103 million parameter transformer model trained on 8 GPUs for 2 days. We engineered this from scratch and filed a provisional utility patent application.