Sep 14, 2020
Technology
How AI Can Help Analyse The Mental Well-being of Nations
Useful. Especially this year.
A COVID-19 pandemic has brought many undesirable and terrifying consequences not only to our daily routine but also to our mindset. Different people experience different psychological aftereffects they have never had before. It could be a constant desire to wash hands or fear of banknotes. While these new habits bring no harm to your physical or mental state, some other consequences lay deeper and might be more damaging to your overall mental state.
Your dreams.
A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. The content and purpose of dreams are not fully understood, although they have been a topic of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history. Dream interpretation is the attempt at drawing meaning from dreams and searching for an underlying message.
In the therapeutic context, dream analysis is one of the most effective practices that help to evaluate the overall mental well-being of an individual.
It is applied in order to help people identify and address their real-life problems or major life events. This practice helps individuals to raise their self-awareness, identify the underlying emotional states and the possible triggers.
Dreams are indeed not a fully understood matter. However, the recent research of UK and Italian scientists have proven that AI can help in getting a better understanding of the origin of dreams.
On the basis of this data, AI can evaluate the stress level and overall psychological well-being of a person.
Obviously, the device cannot see what exactly we are experiencing in a dream. Yet. Instead, it can identify the psychological pattern on the basis of a text report written by the dreamer after they wake up.
According to the Royal Society Open Science journal, now, the dream reports are mined with algorithms in order to recognize the emotional message.
The code analyses the dream by breaking down the text into constituent parts that can be analyzed independently.
The AI objective is to evaluate the most significant parts. It could be characters, communications, activities, overall atmosphere and leading emotions. The results from the pilot studies of this AI tool so far have been inspiring.
Based on the scoring of 24,000 dream reports from Dreambank (the largest public online dream repository), researchers have found supporting evidence that our dreams are a ‘continuation of what happens in our everyday life’.
According to the report, the practical meaning of this research is the opportunity of creating a tool that will automatize the diagnosis of the general mental health on the basis of dream reports’ data.
Prior to AI and its’ possibilities, the examination process of dream reports was a very time-consuming manual task. Whereas, Artificial Intelligence is able to collect and analyse data at an exponential speed.
