Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.
The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.
Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity.
For now, the system is only able to reproduce simple black-and-white images. But Dr. Kang Cheng, a researcher from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, suggests that improving the measurement accuracy will make it possible to reproduce images in color.
“These results are a breakthrough in terms of understanding brain activity,” says Dr. Cheng. “In as little as 10 years, advances in this field of research may make it possible to read a person’s thoughts with some degree of accuracy.”
The researchers suggest a future version of this technology could be applied in the fields of art and design — particularly if it becomes possible to quickly and accurately access images existing inside an artist’s head. The technology might also lead to new treatments for conditions such as psychiatric disorders involving hallucinations, by providing doctors a direct window into the mind of the patient.
ATR chief researcher Yukiyasu Kamitani says, “This technology can also be applied to senses other than vision. In the future, it may also become possible to read feelings and complicated emotional states.”
The research results appear in the December 11 issue of US science journal Neuron.
Incredible. Though as this technology becomes more developed, it could be used for bad purposes.
This sort of technology has been around for a long time actually. Because of how the brain is wired, visual information from the eyes streams together and gets split apart and then gets put together in your frontal cortex somehow. When you recall visual information, the information streams in reverse, from the frontal cortex all the way back to the visual cortex. Because of how the brain is wired again, when your visual cortex gets activated in visual recall (lets say because you are imagining the letter A), it is basically the same thing as actually seeing the letter A; activation of the visual cortex to seeing the letter A has the same pattern as to imagining the letter A. People use this basic principal to essentially "read" people's thoughts.
There are dozens of labs around the world that are interested in this sort of stuff. Some people are interested in how visual images are pieced together in the brain, others are interested in how memory works (visual images that you see in your head are memories) while others are interested in how to predict what people are seeing. A recent study I read had subjects randomly draw a card from a deck, which had an object on it, and then to memorize it and keep the image in their head. The subjects were then scanned with fMRI and with 90% probability, the researchers were able to predict what object the subject was thinking about.
The really limiting factor to being able to "read" people's mind is the technology and the still incomplete picture of the brain; people still don't know how visual information is integrated at the higher areas of the brain and there are still some debates (although this is getting close to being settled) if the same neuronal mechanisms and processes are being used when you see objects and when you imagine objects. Conventional fMRI is 1.5 to 3 Tesla; the most powerful fMRI is 9.4 Tesla. There are more powerful ones in the work but there are health and safety concerns. In addition, fMRI is limited by relatively poor spatial resolution; it can only scan up to 1 mm, which is insufficient to get "clearer" images. Moreover, fMRI has a relatively poor time resolution compared to EEG, which can detect signals at the millisecond scale. Therefore, to get high spatial and temporal resolution using fMRI, you need a very powerful fMRI and you need to use EEG at the same time, which introduces a huge series of technical problems on its own.
People can save their tin foil for packaging food in the mean time. Minority Report won't be happening for a long time although when it does happen, I look forward to being able to record my dreams.
Holy fuck, getting my computer to record my mental images can finally realize my dream of making kick ass and inexpensive movies!
One potential scenario I'd love to see is how the brain would work if it first generates an image, and then that image is inputted back into the brain via observation.
Would the image degrade, or would the brain see what it is imagining, and continue to refine it?
"Now let us be clear, my friends. The fruits of our science that you receive and the many millions of benefits that justify them, are a gift. Be grateful. Or be silent." -Modified Quote
I remember reading about how scientists were able to record the visual input from cats in a discussion about feline night vision and wondering why I hadn't heard of anything like this for humans. Guess I just wasn't reading enough.
I also remember reading about how what the eye records and what we actually see are rather different because of how the brain uses the information to make models and such. This sort of technology would record just the actual images themselves, right?
Grandmaster Jogurt wrote:
I also remember reading about how what the eye records and what we actually see are rather different because of how the brain uses the information to make models and such. This sort of technology would record just the actual images themselves, right?
It's more like "our memories are corrupted almost immediately after witnessing an event/image", IIRC.
JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. - NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11
Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.
MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
While it's rare they'd make good movies, they'd probably be good sources of inspiration for real filmmaking. It'd be interesting to see how it would put the information together, because what people see and experience are different, as noted, I wonder if you'd get the face, for instance, and it would be totally unconnected to a body until you realised in your dream that it ought to have a body and thus pay attention to whether it has a body (or floating entrails, whatever).
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Listen to my music! http://www.soundclick.com/nihilanth "America is, now, the most powerful and economically prosperous nation in the country." - Master of Ossus
Bubble Boy wrote:Holy fuck, getting my computer to record my mental images can finally realize my dream of making kick ass and inexpensive movies!
One potential scenario I'd love to see is how the brain would work if it first generates an image, and then that image is inputted back into the brain via observation.
Would the image degrade, or would the brain see what it is imagining, and continue to refine it?
As PeZook said, there is a degradation in visual images. I have to reiterate that visual imagery is memory, or at least short term memory. The reason why there is so much degradation between what you perceive (what you are actually seeing with your eyes) and what you imagine (what you see inside your head) is because it would defeat the purpose of having memory in the first place. If our brain encoded everything we saw exactly with 100% efficiency, that could result in rapid information build up and inefficient information retrieval. The biological purpose of memory is to encode for things which tend to be important, things that can help you survive and not for things which are trivial and mundane.
Zuul wrote:While it's rare they'd make good movies, they'd probably be good sources of inspiration for real filmmaking. It'd be interesting to see how it would put the information together, because what people see and experience are different, as noted, I wonder if you'd get the face, for instance, and it would be totally unconnected to a body until you realised in your dream that it ought to have a body and thus pay attention to whether it has a body (or floating entrails, whatever).
I would imagine that if we could record our dreams and watch them on a monitor they'd be disjointed, blurry and very abstract. How often is it that when you dream of a person you remember all of their facial features? It's when we wake up that we tend to fill in what was missing so that we can construct a coherent image, or at least I do.
I wish to learn subtle mental arts to prevent the precious juices of my brain-meats from being siphoned away by greedy scientist-ninjas. How might one protect one's thoughts, as it were, from these diabolical probing techniques?
Yours sincerely,
Winston Blake
Robert Gilruth to Max Faget on the Apollo program: “Max, we’re going to go back there one day, and when we do, they’re going to find out how tough it is.”
I wish to learn subtle mental arts to prevent the precious juices of my brain-meats from being siphoned away by greedy scientist-ninjas. How might one protect one's thoughts, as it were, from these diabolical probing techniques?
Yours sincerely,
Winston Blake
Obviously the tin-foil hat, everyone knows that
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"There is no such thing as being too righteous to understand." - Darth Wong
I'd love to be able to record my dreams and replay them.
I've had some that I swear would make good movies.
Hmm, I wonder if the domain "dreamtube.com" is available? Tho, I can't decide if seeing other people's dreams would be totally awesome, or the scariest/creepiest thing ever.
Stark wrote:Why would you waste your time with dreams when you could just spend an hour imagining a movie while conscious?
Sources of inspiration and visuals you otherwise wouldn't have.
EBC|Fucking Metal|Artist|Androgynous Sexfiend|Gozer Kvltist|
Listen to my music! http://www.soundclick.com/nihilanth "America is, now, the most powerful and economically prosperous nation in the country." - Master of Ossus
You'd still need to spend lots of man-hours editing the material (and possibly recordingthe sound). Thoughts, even conscious ones, drift a lot.
JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. - NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11
Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.
MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
Stark wrote:Why would you waste your time with dreams when you could just spend an hour imagining a movie while conscious?
I think that would be a lot of work, a lot of thinking. When I'm asleep I don't have to do any work, my brain does it for me. Think of all the things you'd have to create, a plot, characters, scenes, a story, that's a lot to do. It usually takes script writers quite a while to write a script and brainstorm.
I have always wanted to record and playback my dreams, but is anyone a little freaked by this at all? Privacy of thought is the most private form of privacy you can have, it would be the ultimate invasion of privacy for someone to invade it. And it looks like we're working towards it.
I've imagined what it would be like for someone to read my mind. And thought of what I could do. It's kind of hard to describe, but can you "stifle" your thoughts somewhat, try to push them further inward, try not to think anything. I'd be nervous even to think freely, knowing they could read it. Or try to fill your mind with nonsense, kind of like when a child plugs his ears and yells, so they might receive nothing but nonsensical images.
If a machine can read the way neutrons fire throughout your brain and translate it, no amount of supression will shield your thoughts. It would be like trying to hide arousal or fear from current, quite common, medical scans done for experimentation purposes: it simply can't be done.
At best, the Thought Police would get a "Ohmygod I must hide my thoughts!!!!" message on their telescreens and that would, obviously, result in your arrest
JULY 20TH 1969 - The day the entire world was looking up
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small. - NEIL ARMSTRONG, MISSION COMMANDER, APOLLO 11
Signature dedicated to the greatest achievement of mankind.
MILDLY DERANGED PHYSICIST does not mind BREAKING the SOUND BARRIER, because it is INSURED. - Simon_Jester considering the problems of hypersonic flight for Team L.A.M.E.
PRFYNAFBTFCP
