Will we ever be able to read images from our brains?

Day 43 / 365

Imagine if we had a device that could convert our thoughts to digital images. Or better yet to movies with sound. We could have directors creating movies by himself, a musician recording songs in his mind. We could record and playback our dreams. While this may seem far fetched, might be closer to it than you think.

Experiments with fMRI

In a study conducted at Harvard, the participants were shown a series of images while scans of their brains were taken using an fMRI. The same people were then told to think about the image and another set of scans were recorded.

What they observed was that the difference in the scans while seeing an image vs imagining seeing that image was next to nothing.

In a similar study at Cal Berkeley, participants were shown 100s of hours of youtube videos while their brains were scanned the whole time, thus creating a large training set of the brain reacting to different image sequences.

A brand new movie was then shown to the people and new scan data was recorded. Using this data alone, the computer attempted to recreate what they thought the people saw, and the result as you can see below is quite spooky

Personally, I think this is way better than I had expected when I started watching this ted talk.

The question now is how will we make this technology better. And its all about increasing the resolution of our scanning machines. We have already had thousandfolds increase in resolutions in the last several years and we can hope to see the same in the future.

This story is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — 3 Psychological tricks to help you save money