Getting a glimpse into the "movies in our minds"

MRI-generated color map of brain hemispheres reacting to natural movies / UC Berkeley, Alexander G. Huth, An Vu and Jack L. Gallant,Shinji Nishimoto

It sounds like a scenario from the pages of a Ray Bradbury novel but researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have moved a big step closer toward an era where scientists can record and replay our dreams.

In previous studies, scientists investigating  brain activity recorded static visual patterns but until now nobody had been able to successfully decode brain signals generated by moving pictures.

The breakthrough experiment, reported in the current issue of the journal Biology, used brain imaging and computer simulation to decode and reconstruct Hollywood movie trailers shown to test participants. Encoding models that described how movies get transformed into brain activity were then deployed to decode brain activity and reconstruct the stimulus generated during the act of watching a film.

Although the current technology now only reconstructs video that people had already viewed, the door is open for future work to reproduce dreams and memories. News of the experiment naturally conjures up futuristic scenarios where doctors would be able to read the mind of a coma patient or use brain-machine interface technologies to help stroke victims and people with neurodegenerative diseases such as cerebral palsy.

Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study, described the results as a "major major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery," adding that "we are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

You can find out more about the experiment here.

[mridion]

If this stuff excites you...

Try doing a search on youtube for "electronic harassment", "targeted individual" and the like.

Or go check out these interesting facts
http://www.mindjustice.org/2003_survey.htm

Whats been possible since the 70's with regards to this:
http://geeldon.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/hearing-voices-such-things-are-known/

And the simplest way to match your brainwaves to what you think, via signals sent to your vocal cords, also in use since the 70's by your friendly local secret police
http://www.harold-holt.net/Page02.htm

Also, if you care too, please sign a partition about how much you like this cool technology for the US Govt.
Petition Link: http://wh.gov/4j0

[TheDataRat]

"the current technology now
only reconstructs video that
people had already viewed"

All they need to do know is record in movie-form one's entire visual life (~everything~ we've ever seen), then dream decoding will be easy !

The DataRat