Reconstruction from brain activity

** PLEASE READ THE CAPTION TO UNDERSTAND THIS VIDEO **
The left clip is a segment of a Hollywood movie trailer that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this segment from brain activity measured using fMRI. The procedure is as follows:
[1] Record brain activity while the subject watches several hours of movie trailers.
[2] Build dictionaries (i.e., regression models) that translate between the shapes, edges and motion in the movies and measured brain activity. A separate dictionary is constructed for each of several thousand points at which brain activity was measured.
(For experts: The real advance of this study was the construction of a movie-to-brain activity encoding model that accurately predicts brain activity evoked by arbitrary novel movies.)
[3] Record brain activity to a new set of movie trailers that will be used to test the quality of the dictionaries and reconstructions.
[4] Build a random library of ~18,000,000 seconds (5000 hours) of video downloaded at random from YouTube. (Note these videos have no overlap with the movies that subjects saw in the magnet). Put each of these clips through the dictionaries to generate predictions of brain activity. Select the 100 clips whose predicted activity is most similar to the observed brain activity. Average these clips together. This is the reconstruction.

For a related video see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMA23J...
For the paper (Nishimoto et al., 2011, Current Biology) go to:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011....
For more information about this work, please check our lab web site:http://gallantlab.org

• Category

  Science & Technology

[FromFame]

a lot of us might be against this new technology, but frankly all our parents and their parents were against all new tech, now are we going to repeat this or understand that we should take responsibility and use this power?

[thegafferlives]

This means I could relive my wanks in HD.

[kenshiku36]

to be precise, not all humans are Americans.

[SilverSurpher1]

It's already too late for that. We have polygraph tests that supposedly are able to show if a person is lying or not. It apparently doesn't matter if the person being tested is nervous or not. I'm not sure how accurate they are but that is already some intrusion into a person's mind.

[SilverSurpher1]

True, but many humans, including the most intelligent, lack common sense. I really don't know how this technology could be used irresponsibly but I'm sure someone will figure out someway to do it.

[SilverSurpher1]

I noticed the 'Lot 4 Life' part but didn't see the 'Rap A' part.

[8Maik]

pause at 0:14 and read the writings, it says Rap-A-Lot-4-Life

[prosper58]

I say if we can do it, do it. I see nothing wrong here.

[FromFame]

chill man, not all humans are idiots.