UC Berkeley came up with a method to reconstruct video from activity in your brain.
Using an fMRI, hours of analyzing the individual’s brain activity, then reconstructing the video by mixing and matching 18 million seconds of comparable video on YouTube to create a wholly new image that corresponds to the source footage, we can read your mind. Albeit it’s blurry and “impressionistic” but it’s an astonishing breakthrough. Think where this technology will be given another decade – or 25 years.
Not in any way surprised that faces were the most obviously matched. Humans do best with faces, and we store them
Was impressed with the bit of white on the chest of the blurry person which matched up to the medal on the chest of the real person.
The airplane didn’t do so hot, compared to the other things.
What I’m wanting to see now is a set of people who work with planes, or have been impacted strongly by airplanes and see how their brains do with airplanes, or people who work with elephants do with elephants - basically to see if brains give a much clearer impression of something that is known or has made a strong impact. (I’m betting that it does.)
I saw this via a link on Facebook. I thought they were kidding at first.
One of the comments was along the lines of, “You just know someone is now trying to figure out how to prosecute our brains for copyright infringement…”
No idea. But if we’ve found a way to “read” the visual machinations of such a complex and mysterious meat computer like our brains, I think it’s only a matter of time before we can tap into other aspects.
So far, this tech seems merely voyeuristic, in that you can only observe. If we can decode the visual, I’m sure audio’s right around the corner – then “reading thoughts.” :eek:
Not sure how you would reproduce smell, taste and touch (yet)?
As awesome and scary as this is, imagine the insight we might gain from this sort of thing. I’m fascinated by the idea of being able to “view” someone’s dreams. What would it look like? Would it make any sense in the way watching a video would? Or does such imagined imagery take place on a whole different level of brain activity? If so, how would you calibrate it?
Once the resolution and accuracy of such technology increases, it’ll be very interesting to see some novel applications; if only academic.
How would that work, practically? We are terrible at determining spatial location with smells. Sound would give direction but not pinpoint location. Either motor touch or somatosensory touch has some resolution but we can determine that already. ETA: how touch etc. is represented.
We are able to get greater resolution in fMRI because our visual areas are that much larger than those devoted to other senses.
But, but we already have the technology. A simple hospital on House did this, so it must be true! And no giant scanner needed!
Just checked and, yup, same author as this paper (PDF, dense)
I wouldn’t think audio would help with that. Do you actually “hear” your thoughts in your head as words? As far as I can tell, I only do so when subvocalizing–which generally means when I’m writing something or preparing to speak. The best you could hope to get out of that is a few variations on what I’m about to say out loud, anyway.
I guess you might be able to listen in on whatever song someone has stuck in their head…but are you sure you want to?
Amazing. I knew work was being done in this direction but had no idea it had come anywhere near this far.
I actually recall the potential conflict of technology like this with our rabid copyright laws being brought up years ago. That some technology like this was pretty much inevitable, and either we’d have to finally rewrite our laws to be more reasonable or literally start prosecuting people for looking at or imagining copyrighted material.
Eventually, quite possibly - or anything else you can imagine. It’s my understanding that we use the same brain functions to imagine images that we do to see them; so a technique to extract images you see should potentially allow the extraction of those you imagine, as well. I’ve contemplated on occasion the idea of something like a sophisticated version of this combined with image manipulation software; something that combines human imagination with modern graphics techniques could be a whole new way of creating art.
Also; “close your eyes Ms Smith and think of the face of the man who attacked you.”
