They've done it! Scientists have decoded and reconstructed images in our brains

A year and a half ago, we published a great feature on the current state of the quest to read the human mind. It included some then in-progress work from Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at U.C. Berkeley, in which Gallant was attempting to reconstruct a video by reading the brain scans of someone who watched that video--essentially pulling experiences directly from someone's brain. Now, Gallant and his team have published a paper on the subject in the journal Current Biology.

Source



I find it interesting the images retrieved in the clip above look different than the clip shown to the subject. For example: Look at Steve Martin at 11 seconds in on the left and compare it to the image the subject was seeing on the right. Steve has a coat on with a medal hanging around his neck while the subject sees a short sleeve t-shirt with a shorter medal strap. I read somewhere that we have about 24 different thoughts per second. Perhaps these are overlays of different thoughts combined with the correct visual?

What wild times we live in!

Dead link & already posted.

2nd

reply to post by FlySolo


I only see camels... and nuclear weapons.
Is there something wrong with me?

Are you supposed to cross your eyes and stare off center or something?


ETA: Praise Allah! I think I finally found Waldo! (peace be upon him!)

It's possible they might be able to retrieve the last images of murdered victims and reconstruct the face of their killer. (Ex: OJ coming at you with a knife)

Why stop at images, might be possible to pull auditory info as well.

Aren't men supposed to think about sex every few minutes?

I don't think this technology is wise....

This is probably one of the scariest things I've ever seen in my life. Before long, we won't even have a refuge left in your own minds. You wonna talk about thought police? lol.

Originally posted by Alxandro
It's possible they might be able to retrieve the last images of murdered victims and reconstruct the face of their killer. (Ex: OJ coming at you with a knife)

Why stop at images, might be possible to pull auditory info as well.

I doubt it as the person has to be thinking at the time, or else the brain is dead..

I'd expect even if they could activate a dead brain, it would be a jumble of firing neurons that have no meaning and therefore not representative of what the person's last thoughts were.

Originally posted by AnIntellectualRedneck
This is probably one of the scariest things I've ever seen in my life. Before long, we won't even have a refuge left in your own minds. You wonna talk about thought police? lol.

why? We already have things such as lie detectors that can be fooled.

You're missing the point, I think. You don't get sedated or have your mind read, this is only for what you are actively thinking about... so unless you're the sort of person who gets sweaty and anxious if put under a lie detector and asked about having an affair - as in, you're going to fail it by actively feeling guilty when asked - then this is no different..

"Can you please think about the time you murdered your boss, please."
"I didn't..." *Thinks about killing his boss*

^ that's the only way it'd work.

At first i was like "wow", but then i read how the study was done:

They took changes in brain activity and then transposed it over 100's of thousands of youtube videos with similar visuals.

Its really just responding to changes in brain activity by changing visuals. Thats why one picture shows a guy in a tux when the brain seems to show a guy in a t-shirt.

reply to post by mainidh


I dunno, the thought of having my mind read by some random machine sort of freaks me out. The potential for abuse with something like this is overwhelming.

Originally posted by FlySolo

I find it interesting the images retrieved in the clip above look different than the clip shown to the subject. For example: Look at Steve Martin at 11 seconds in on the left and compare it to the image the subject was seeing on the right. Steve has a coat on with a medal hanging around his neck while the subject sees a short sleeve t-shirt with a shorter medal strap. I read somewhere that we have about 24 different thoughts per second. Perhaps these are overlays of different thoughts combined with the correct visual?

I've seen this video quite some time ago, if I recall correctly they aren't actually getting the images from your brain, the images are created from youtube videos. Your brain only sends a signal that tells the program to create similar images to what your thinking about using the videos.

So that's why you would see random stuff like ties or medals out of place, because they were created from random youtube videos morphed together.

This is pretty interesting.

The didn't read brain waves directly but indirectly.

They had the person watch movie trailers and they have set up a program to match you tube clips with brain waves. So they just match the brain waves of the individual watching movie trailers and they don't have any idea about the you tube clips.

This is pretty impressive because the brain wave's of the person watching the trailers was then ran through this program.

It would seem all you have to do is expand the library of clips and images. It's like the pre-cogs in Minority Report. The way they would see a scene play out.

This would have benefits but would be unethical in my opinion.

For instance you couldn't monitor single thoughts because a guy thinking of a terrorist attack could be doing so because he just saw a movie involving a terrorist attack. You would have to monitor everyone's thoughts and look for patterns. Is a guy thinking about a terrorist attack, virgins, mosques, radical clerics and more.

To do this though would require a huge invasion of privacy into everyone's thoughts.