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=KMA23JJ1M1o
For the paper (Nishimoto et al., 2011, Current Biology) go to:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.031
For more information about this work, please check our lab web site:http://gallantlab.org

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Jack Gallant
• Shinji Nishimoto
• neuroscience
• brain
• decoding
• fmri
• berkeley

[TheBadassLemon]

Major Scientific Breakthrough that may very well shape the future of technology - 1.9 Mil Views

Cat lands on Face - 20 Mil Views

I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

[TheJamesgravy]

Test it on a blind person

[Janelsendigga]

i think you shouldn't mix up the experiment, this is no visualization of thoughts. it's just some information from the activity in parts of the brain where we "interpret" what our eyes see. so its not very logical to say these images show anything like a memory or something, sounds more logical that these are technicaly caused dissortion which you (and me) take for faces when we see it.

[TheStorytime7]

It's the fact that people care more about cute and/or funny things than things that are much more important that bothers people. Also, "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" is a Futurama quote that became an internet meme, in case you didn't know.

[suomikarpo]

If the fact that people enjoy watching cute or funny stuff online bothers you that much, Then kill youself.

[houari2009]

fucking creepy and scary

[chihuahuabebi]

wow those geniuses from UC Berkeley are crazy

[TheMichellepop]

how amazing to think that

[wwwtotalitaerde]

Projecting pictures or movies onto the brain of blind people was already described in 1928. The light waves were truely amplitude modulated by pockels cells or similar devices ( not just dimmed or switched ). Amplitude modulation of any wave causes sidebands with the frequency of the modulation signal. The sidebands then cause low frequency beats which pass through the scull and induce low frequency currents in the nervecells which simulate the natural nerve signals.

[DoomTay]

So it's possible to dig up past sightings...kind of

so much for using it to try to remember things. Though who knows whether it's the technology for the brain.

[RainnusShin]

they will make you wear blindfolds all the time by law or go to jail because piracy will be big.