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Japanese Scientists Claim To Reconstruct Images From Brain Data
In a world first, a research group in Kyoto Japan has succeeded in processing and displaying optically received images directly from the human brain. Here's the Japanese press release for good measure. One step closer to broadcasting your dreams? The research is due to be published today in the US scientific journal Neuron
It was a male subject and the image was Hentai.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
And once again Isaac Asimov predicted this.
Free Martian Whores!
Expect any sample images in Japanese publication to be heavily pixelated.
Quick, everyone picture Scarlett Johansson naked.. ..I need some new pictures for my collection
Did they use a USB port?
I have lots of cool images in my head for comics and wallpaper, however I lack the artistic talent to bring those images from my mind to paper/photoshop. Maybe soon I will be able to compensate for my lack of artistic ability.
The visual cortex is one of the more understood areas of the brain, and decoding V1/V2 is low-hanging fruit. To the extent that memory and dreams back-project to these areas, perhaps recording parts of these experiences would be possible.
Making this practical and inexpensive would be quite a practical breakthrough though - imagine being able to imagine something and import it into GIMP from a headband. Doing this through MRI would be impractical unless someone would be able to keep the image stable in their head for long enough for a high resolution scan of the area (and bear the ~$700/hour cost of MRI).
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Does this mean that I can't broadcast my imagination before 22:00?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Honestly? Come on now. Saying you can retrieve images from the mind, then not showing said pictures is the same as claiming you've achieved cold fusion without showing any energy for it.
I think this is the first time I can scientifically say, "Pics or it didn't happen."
An odd choice of words in the title. Is this really so unbelievable, considering the progress we've seen so far in brain-machine interfaces?
If it is simply scientific rigor, then why doesn't every title on a new discovery include the words "claim to"?
In the recent experiment, the research group asked two people to look at 440 different still images one by one on a 100-pixel screen. Each of the images comprised random gray sections and flashing sections.
100 pixels? Sounds like they were watching japanese porn...
I saw this on "Fringe" a couple of weeks ago.
A Berkeley group has already reported this in Nature using similar methods: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/abs/nature06713.html)
THEY have been able to do this for decades! Where is your tinfoil hat now? Ha!
Deleted
Once Apple builds this into the next iPhone, everyone will be able to see what a perv I am.
An interesting idea. Assuming that it is able to be perfected, you could theoretically try and recreate those 'energy patterns' in a persons mind to create the image. Of course I'm mostly pulling that out of my ass, but once you can go one way, it makes going the other way easier. Not necessarily possible, but still an interesting idea. The ways to abuse this either way is staggering though.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
This , if true , will have HUGE implications - we'll be able to see what people THINK. I don't know if you actually grasp the monument dimensions of this. Checking for terrorism, knowing if you are really loved, truth telling machines, like the internet, something like this can level the plain field for a long long time...
Years ago I was a sign language interpreter (ASL), and after a few years realized that I was thinking in ASL and "visually" instead of the usual auditory monologue... I always wondered if you use a completely different part of the brain to process the language - or if it just gets translated into language concepts before processing... I wonder how long before "telepathic" audio is available.
meh
Ive often thought this might be possible - get a Neural Network to analyse those MRI images we could have some interesting results.
N.
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People read blurby summaries, which don't include the results, the full reasoning, methods, etc, and then act as if it's the fault of the researchers. It's absurd, that's neither the paper nor the direct work of the researchers, it's some non-scientist working for a news source. Read the actual paper, TFA in these cases are rarely any better than TFS.
http://download.cell.com/neuron/pdf/PIIS0896627308009586.pdf
There's the PDF. It does have the very pixelated images. I haven't had time to read through it.
As always, don't complain to me if you don't happen to have a subscription, and not having a subscription is no reason to act as if the results aren't real.
I need batteries.
the things I picture in my mind are illegal in 49 out of 50 states so this ain't good.
They use fMRI scans. This means they measure the blood flow which powers the neurons. It is like measuring the power usage of the various parts of the gpu and figuring out the graphics it is rendering...
Of course a real neural interface would be amazing (first of all imagine of all the pr0n - yeah, that's what I mean, you just have to IMAGINE!, rule 34!) but we are not even close. Or as journalists would very incorrectly state "we are light years from that" (hmm, unless they mean the brain scanning center in the Betelgeuse system).
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I better start thinking good thoughts... dont want to any one to see all the porno stuff in my brain!
Dr. Walter Bishop (Cambridge) was doing this in the '70s.
is the world leader in creepy technology
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This was actually done 5 to 10 years ago with cats. The researchers used directly implanted electrodes to 'see' the same things the cats were seeing. I've always thought this was one of the most-amazing-yet-little-known pieces of research I've ever read. I can't recall the journal or anything like that, but that article at least DID have pictures.
Would looking at the image your brain is generating at the same time you are generating it create a feedback loop much like holding a microphone too close to a speaker?
Dreams appear to be based on the 'noise' coming in, but a lot of interpretation is applied (and without imposed constraints of consistency or logic). A common game/prank involves people asking yes/no questions about an alleged dream, but the answers they get are based on some simple scheme like "yes if the last word in the question they ask ends in a consonant". Surprisingly detailed 'stories' get constructed... by the person asking the questions. (Here's what appears to be an online version.) Actual dreams seem to be built in an analogous way, with the subconscious 'asking questions' of the senses (which are just feeding in 'static') and weaving an experience out of them.
I'd guess that 'eavesdropping' on dreams via this means would only get the kind of swirling colors and such you 'see' when you close your eyes.
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Reminds me of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.
I recall an old episode from FUTURAMA series, where commercials are projected directly into dreams during night sleeps. does this sounds like the next step?
nop, nop, nop #VBLANK
And some Paprika to go with it.
And people thought I was silly when I started selling tin-foil hats - Perfect for floods, tying up small packages, and blocking my other money making thoughts from the view of the japanese brain spying overlords.
HAH!
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Just wondering what the Department of Homeland Security would do with technology like this. Its kind of scary, don't you think? Especially if this gets optimized and is proven accurate. On the other hand, imagine being able to reconstruct exact images from the mind of a victim to identify their assailant? But then you still have an issue with accuracy because human memory is so prone to being influenced. Still, pretty neat stuff.
Now I have life time storage of pictures running since day 1 of my life.
* Hike up the mountain
* Singing with friends.
* Cute redhead in compromising position...
WHOA! Careful what you think there slick when showing pics to the family! ;)
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I saw a poster from a group at Berkely at the Society for Neuroscience meeting last month that was doing something very similar. The "reconstructions" look like gray blobs that show some of the same structure features of the image. So if the picture was a building by a lake, there might be a dark region in the reconstruction that approximates the location of the lake, and maybe a lighter blob where the building is, but the resolution is super-low. Since the BOLD images generated by fMRI are so heavily averaged to begin with (both spatially across neurons and temporally), this is not surprising. Still, the raw reconstruction was cool in an of itself. But they also had a bayesian model informed by priors (based on some huge image set from the internet) that allowed them to "reconstruct" both symantic and structural content with a much higher resolution. Or maybe better to say meta-resolution since the "reconstruction" was actually a picture selected from the huge data set that best expressed the spatial and semantic content of the image being viewed and not a true reconstruction. Depending on your world-view, it was either pretty cool or pretty disturbing. But, the reconstructions were also very closely tied to the models of visual cortex, which is a relatively well understood brain region. No way they could reconstruct what you were imagining or thinking (yet), just what activations patterns are occurring as a direct result of visual stimulation.
Is "we are light years from that" any worse than "it will be veeeery long way before we have that"?
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so they claimed to read his brain.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Didn't read the full article, but from the abstract
The article you linked to seems to only be able to tell which object a person saw from their fMRI. I believe it required established measurements too, IE "this part of the brain lights up when they see a face. In blind studies, that part of the brain lit up, so they must have seen a face."
Whether it required a calibration for each individual or not, no image reconstruction was done: it's not the same thing at all.
I'm in ur MRI
Van Eck phreaking ur mind...
Smell that? You smell that? Burning karma, son. Nothing in the world smells like that...
The primary visual cortex (V1) has already been shown to be retinotopic. What's being seen can be mapped directly from the cortex. It's crude and low-res, but it works.
20 years ago a researcher working with Karl Pribram at Radford University was able to detect signals from small cellular assemblies of the visual cortex that represented a particular shape being viewed without mapping the entire shape from V1.
In both these, the images were received directly from the brain. In both they were digitally processed and presented. In all three what was retrieved was not an image, but was a pattern of neural electrical activity that they had already determined represented a particular visual field. They could not (in keeping with the /. tendency to represent reality with fiction) for instance, retrieve the third frame of a series of images that had been briefly presesnted. They would have had to show the image for some time that record EEG from the appropriate areas for long enough that they could get a good correlation when showing it a second time.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
just make sure you screen those dream movies before letting your significant other see them....
Am I the only one who immediately thought that this is going to be added to the metal detectors at the airport to catch "terrorists"?
"The current accomplishment is low hanging fruit and therefore uninteresting. Surprising, really, that they found funding for such an unnecessary demonstration at all! By commercializing this technology, it would become sufficiently interesting to deserve my royal approval."
Belittling humanity's incremental advancement as if you're a third party, how's that working out for you?
I think it's tremendously exciting. Thanks for the buzzkill though, it reminds me to get off the computer and interact with people of my choosing.
This opens so many doors for abuse. I'm sorry they were even working on this. It seems like I need that aluminum foil after all.
This gets people all worked up but will never happen the way we imagine it. We are afraid that "they" can see into our minds and know all those dirty little secrets that we keep hidden away. If dreams are viewable then thoughts will be and if people saw what we are really thinking then our secrets would be out.
Is it light? No. Is it thought? No.
The fastest thing in the world is the crap. You crap yourself in the pants before you think about it or turn on the lights on the bathroom
Moreso than any artisitic ramifications, I find it exciting that this might be used to better understand and communicate with the mentally challenged. For example, it would be amazing to have feedback from an autistic mind to gain insight and clarity on what's going on up there to better improve the interactive process and possibly even better understand the root cause.
I think code must faster than I can type. Soon I will be able to just wear a sensor filled helmet and think code and this machine would convert it to an emacs macro and fill in the source. Yay!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Also, I'm reminded of the interrogation device from the movie Barb Wire, the one that pulls out images from your brain whether you want it to or not...
probably more like pointing a video camera at a monitor, the "hall of mirrors" effect...
FINALLY! Someone will be able to help me find that dream girl I keep dreaming of! Think she'll be able to forgive me? [nudge, nudge. wink, wink.]
It is, if it is not used metaphorically and you actually think "light year" measures time. You are right though, the phrase I chose is not a good example of that.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I think this would be amazing for law enforcement sketches. Instead of having to ask a witness what the person looked like, they could just copy it out of their visual cortex. No, it wouldn't be perfect, and it wouldn't be acceptable in court as proof someone was there (since you can just imagine your worst enemy in the place of the actual person), but it would help with sketches for wanted posters and the like. Especially if it was cheap and easy.
I just skimmed both papers, looks like the Japanese group goes well beyond what they did at Berkeley, capturing true images, whereas the Berkeley group only found some evidence that this would be possible.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Oh, I remembered one such instance I read in a paper not long ago. In one of those "scientific" articles it mentioned that photons from the sun take 8 light-minutes to reach earth... Obviously the writer thought a light-minute/year etc is time when it applies to light, or something like that. Anyway, don't tell me you haven't read stuff like that...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Or as journalists would very incorrectly state "we are light years from that" (hmm, unless they mean the brain scanning center in the Betelgeuse system).
Our planet/solar system/galaxy is moving through space, and at the time we discover said technology we could very well be light years away from the location we are at today.
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I wonder if the process can be reversed, and images can be fed into the brain to create a dream sequence? Will people who really hate their reality use this as an escape and never try to wake up again?
Cool story!
Best "String" Ever!
I think a direct mind-picture system would constitute a new artistic medium, with it's own advantages and drawbacks. There would still be a learning curve, and traditional drawing/painting skills would no doubt assist the artist. You might also combine the forms to touchup the captured mental images using more traditional methods.
Alternatively one might use it in the manner of a camera. Things would get most interesting when we learn to directly pipe these experiences into another person's mind...
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
That's 10 x 10 pixels.
Even the best dreams won't look like much at that resolution... - j
...can now be seen again!
Didn't they do something like this on Fox's Fringe series as a plot device?
For anyone unfamiliar with the show, it's basically Fox's response to Eureka on the SciFi channel, only much, much darker and probably unlikely to last more than one season...
8==8 Bones 8==8
I haven't read the article yet. Does it include any brainshots? (Please, no JFK jokes...)
Reconstruct a known pattern?? Big Friggin' Deal. It's not hard when you know what you are looking for. Wake me up when they can tap into someone's brain and pull out a random image!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114558/
Record your experiences/what you see on a disc, play it back for others. Great concept, great movie. Really!
Finnaly something much more tangible for Dreamcasting!
I always wondered how the President of the USA could end up with his brain missing but mostly why it could be missing. I figured the Sci-Fi stories of brain scanning and the likes probably had someone worried something in JFK's memory should stay hidden unknown to all others.
now it seems that if this was the case, they just might have based their actions on a valid fear.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
nuf said
Don't think so. Just because you are envisioning/imagining a terrorist action or a plane blowing up doesn't mean you are planning to do so. Context matters... you could just be afraid of such a thing happening, which would be all too common these days.
I have a feeling that if someone were record one of their nightmares and then watch it when awake, the conscious brain wouldn't be able to cope with what the subconscious brain can. Watching it would give you nightmares. And the cycle begins...
If you know anything about neural networks, and that their whole storage, and thereby their whole structure, is dependent on all previous input, you know that this is bullshit.
They would have to re-work the whole tuning process for every brain, and partially also for two scans that have a certain time-distance, thereby making the whole thing completely useless, except for demonstration purposes.
Or in simple As long as they are not able to learn to know you very well, and feed this data to their software, there's no chance they can ever get any useful data out of your brain. Oh, and it is highly likely, that they change the brain so much in that process (trough having to feed it so much test/comparison data), that the only reliable stuff they can extract, is the test data they fed it before.
I for one will not buy me a tinfoil hat because of this.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
And imagine spending the next week try to figure out GIMP to be able to do anything with it~
As if it were any easier to figure out Adobe software. Or did you mean something other than the typical PS vs. GIMP flamewar?
Soon, they'll be recording the images along with the sensations. They you'll be able to play it back into your head or somebody else's.
Could give new meaning to torture.
Seriously, this technology would help in solving some crimes.
stories...
How long before UK police want a "brain drain device", due to record number of arrests for teen stabbings and other crimes that rival PC confiscations/forensic investigations?
If this brain imagery tool is a real, working device, it can only be short period of time before psychotropic drugs make a comeback but face usage in conjunction with a brain scanner.
Talk about brain-drain total information awareness...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
If you read the article, you'll note that they can only identify which image from a known set of very simple images the subject is looking at.
Yes, yes, early days, but if you think of the brain patterns being monitored as being like a hash of the actual image, it illustrates how limited this is.
Analogy (no cars):
Take a set of known words, hash each of them. Select a random word from that list. Now hash it. Compare that hash to the list of hashed words to find out what word was selected.
This doesn't mean that downloading entire dreams will every be possible.
Just an idle thought, but wouldn't it be easier to capture what somebody hears, or sounds they imagine?
There are already cochlear implants and supposedly, if what I've read is true, the ear's nerves have some kind of feedback when people imagine sounds/music. There's also involuntary muscle movement associated with internal monologue and acoustic memory. Maybe studying those involuntary movements can explain the structure behind that compulsive group ritual, dancing.
Not to mention real applications for diagnosing and treating mental illnesses, like scizophrenia.
The overwhelming possibilities of this are fantastic, if the technology to understand the brains electronic signals can be refined in such a way that the image can be made
1) larger
2) colored
3) finer details.
Its like, the beginnings of a flip book- and the possibility of being able to move forward into something like we have today with movies. I know these aren't made to make animations, but the point is that the power welded by people who can refine this into a viable technology would be pretty phenomenal, and life changing.
The dream police, they live inside of my head.
The dream police, they come to me in my bed.
The dream police, they're coming to arrest me, oh no.
You know that talk is cheap, and those rumors ain't nice.
And when I fall asleep I don't think I'll survive the night, the night.
cause they're waiting for me.
They're looking for me.
Every single night they're driving me insane.
Those men inside my brain.
The dream police, they live inside of my head.
(live inside of my head.)
etc...
One of the better movies by Wim Wenders featuring a soundtrack by U2. In the movie Max von Sydow plays an eccentric researcher who invents a machine that can record dreams and play them back on machines that look a lot like laptop computers, leading to an epidemic of profound malaise.
On the other hand, the malaise may have been due to the world's most popular search engine being slow as hell and embodied by an obnoxious 3D animated bear.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Roddenberry and his writers were prescient, too. I remember a world without cell phones, ...
(Actually, self-opening doors were around at least as early as 1952 or so. Almost got hit in the head by one as a kid when trying to look at the phototube assembly.)
I hear that the first clamshell cellphone was consciously modeled on the Star Trek communicators. (Motorola named it the "Star Tak" - hint, hint! B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Nothing but Hentai, I imagine.
Have gnu, will travel.
oh no, zombie scientists from japan create brain extract!!! save yourselves!!
Call me when they can make my dreams real. Then I can implement my test of volleyball players playing in a pool of jello.
Could Jelloball help reduce knee injuries, and be the next Olympic sport?
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
.. a long time ago.
And here it is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface
"In 1999, researchers led by Yang Dan at University of California, Berkeley decoded neuronal firings to reproduce images seen by cats."
or it didn't happen.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
I guess we'll finally find out if my blue really isn't your blue. (In case you're wondering what I'm talking about: a common example in low level psychology and related subjects is the question whether my blue is the same as your blue or not. This is not about whether our associations are different, but if for example, if you look at an object that is blue, you are seeing something which I would consider red for example. Except that you'd call red blue of course.)
(Actually, self-opening doors were around at least as early as 1952 or so. Almost got hit in the head by one as a kid when trying to look at the phototube assembly.)
Geek!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
1) Get a male grad student in their early 20s. Dose them up with aphrodisiacs as well as mushrooms, LSD and whatever else boosts visual imagination to epic proportions.
2) Sell the resulting movie as hyper-porn.
3) ??????
4) Profit.
... think-to-shutter!
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
One step away from DBB! (Daily Brain Backups)!
Pics or it didn't happen!
Of course, their images were reconstructed from _dead_ people.
I often hear the maxim from SF writers that every book is allowed one miracle. Fringe started the series by holding that maxim down and stomping it to death.
Reminds me of this anime. Part of the premise is that since your brain uses electrical signals to transmit information you can
a) Read data
b) Transmit data
Thus you can effectively have mind control over a bunch of people by broadcasting a signal and have them interpret it with their brains, bypassing the senses. When you have multiple people identifying the same object, it becomes "real" to them, as opposed to just a delusion.
Actually, self-opening doors were around at least as early as 1952 or so
Not according to a biography of Walt Disney I read in the '80s. Disney's "imagineers" went to the Star Trek people wanting to know how the doors worked. They explained that it was actuallly two guys offstage opening the doors.
1952 was a long time ago, that was the year I was born, Eisenhower was first elected President and the term "Rock and Roll" was coined. Do you mean 1972? I never saw a self-opening door until about then. Do you have a citation?
I hear that the first clamshell cellphone was consciously modeled on the Star Trek communicators. (Motorola named it the "Star Tak"
I had one of those. I remember whipping it out and saying "beam me up!"
Free Martian Whores!
"they'd probably put my head/in a guillotine"
I'm the citation. I saw it. I was young enough that I was slightly over eye-high to the photocell - which was white-light, had an aperture of about an inch, and would be about hip-high now, which is why I'm not dead-sure of the year.
It was on a store in Michigan - and I don't recall the town because we were visiting relatives at the time. It was also a very unusual thing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Now not only that they know where you are, and what are you doing and what are you saying, but can actually arrest you on grounds of thinking illegal. I'd say it's time for a nuclear war to wipe most of us and to delete most of our technological achievements [luckily, mostly stored on magnetic disks], because things are going wrong way. Or at least, implementation of technologies is.