Slashdot Mirror
Brain Imaging Reveals the Movies In Our Mind
wisebabo sends word that scientists from UC Berkeley have developed a method for scanning brain activity and then constructing video clips that represent what took place in a person's visual cortex (abstract). The technology is obviously quite limited, and "decades" away from any kind of sci-fi-esque thought reading, but it's impressive nonetheless. From the news release:
"[Subjects] watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or 'voxels.' ... The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity. Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject. Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie."
A couple seasons ago...
Onda Technology Institute
Does this mean I can record my dreams with Scarlett Johansen and Natalie Portman and view them at a later date? Or sell them on ebay?
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
There are no images in the mind. And no dogs in dog biscuits.
In the not to distant future we will have REAL thought police!
how quickly the MPAA sued the scientists for infringement of copyright
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
If I go watch a movie in the theater, then replay it to my friends later from my mind.. Would that be an illegal bootleg?
The video showing the original source and "output" is misleading.
The output is not synthesized directly from the fMRI data.
Rather, they take a bunch of samples from youtube and try to find a sample that generates the closest match the fMRI data.
Still impressively neat. It's just that they need to more explicitly explain what they're doing.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
We all don't like being tracked via Cookies on our Web Browser, how do think this is going to pan out years down the road?
Talk about absolutely no Privacy . . . EVER . . . .
Let's not even get going on the unethical uses our Government's are going to put this too . . . .
I don't like this at all :(
Starting at @0:06 and the words. Who the heck did they test this on and why do they apparently subtitle their thoughts?
@0:07, the words "Powershot" 2 secs in the bottom right.
"Lot4Life" in the elephants.
This is going to be a RTFA story it appears.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
Great. Now they're going to build an Animus and make poor test subjects go insane.
I think I still got it somewhere at the bottom of a paper box...
I'm Not Antisocial, I'm Just Not User Friendly
they want to know when you'll be sending your royalty checks to them. Please make the check out to "All Your Thought Belong to Us"...
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
that video validated every single nightmare i've ever had
The M.P.A.A. asking DHS to install brainscanners on Airports to fight piracy (you need an additional license to remember a movie)...
The output has apparently been touched up by a Mr. Francis Bacon...
Fantastic movie, if you can actually get your hands on a copy: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101458/
This science is the watershed in human/machine interfaces. An improved version of this tech will give computers direct reads of our visual mind. We will imagine scenes that computers will interpret to execute.
How far along are we getting in cheap, low-power SQUID caps (or alternative gear) that we can wear to express to our Internet and personal processors what we imagine happening, so our machines can make it so?
--
make install -not war
so what now? What kind of an encrypted link of - image to brain (or sound or text to brain), are music and movie studios going to require government mandates? Because clearly, this shit is an unauthorized copy right there.
You can't handle the truth.
The fact that this is compiled from superimposed youtube clips in no way detracts from how absolutely awesome this is. If I were to tell you what I'm seeing, you would also compare my description with images that you know and imagine my vision via metaphors.... which, all things considered, works quite well in everyday life, by the way.
Well, it's a step closer to that movie, anyways. Maybe in 10 or 20 years. :-)
fMRI imaging of brain activity through blood flow might be useful and all, but if it's measuring in low-resolution voxels you're not going to be able to resolve specific areas of V1, 2 and 3, the three layers of the visual cortex responsible for decoding different portions of visual imput.
Another reason to be glad I don't have kids...
The future is a scary place. I'm reminded of the Dune universe, in which there are no computers because the populace rose up, overthrew their AI robot masters, and banned them. I wonder when that will happen on Earth. Anybody think some day we're not going to want this sort of technology around?
the quality sucks. But honestly, BRAVO! Keep at it, guys!
On a whim I submitted this story (as you can see I'm the submittor) with the URL and a ONE WORD summary:
"Unbelievable"
The Slashdot editors either have a sense of humor and/or they don't mind doing some background research. They produced the paragraph long summary you see above and they went to the original article to clip out sone text and pictures.
So thanks! Do you get paid? :)
While increadibly cool, I see it leading to a lot of divorces...
Man: Honey, I had this hilarous dream last night, youv'e got to watch it! *plugs himself into the tv*
Woman: Why is your secretary wearing that skimpy dress in your dream?!?!?
Man: I.. uh.. that's a weird coicidence!
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
This is extremely impressive. That's better quality than I got on my first TV.
Isn't this the plot of Mystery Science Theater 3000?
What's really interesting is that this theoretically also could be used to view memories.
Tesla had this idea way back when.
In other words, is the scanning that is done only valid
for the test subject, or can you now use that same data
to analyze another test subjects visual cortex ?
The summary strongly implies that they had to calibrate it for each of the three study participants.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
"ERROR DATABASE CONNECTION"
I was just thinking that.....amazing.
The summary strongly implies that they had to calibrate it for each of the three study participants.
Collectively or separately? :)
To
From TFS:
"This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program..."
Torturing computers and software should be against the law.
it will not be your lucky day when the RIAA will scan your brain while remembering a movie you saw last week
I see this more of an innovative VJ technique, which is cool indeed, rather than a reliable brain reader (or even vision center reader). Nevertheless, the output could be made more psychedelic, colorful and various. The idea and implementation is indeed very fun to us, IT people, because we usually love data crunching and we are enthusiastic about sci-fi, but, seriously... The title of the post is badly chosen.
This is fantastic, I hope they make further progress on this soon. This is big!
... is 5000 hours, so why not just say that.
I see the fantastic opportunity this kind of technology can give us, but I also have a couple of concerns:
1. Can this be theoretically be done from satelites?
2. If I record a dream and publish it on youtube, can I be held liable for copyright infringement?
MAFIAA is pleased to announce that in their effort to combat piracy, lobotomy is now included in the list of remedies for three-strikes infraction. Naturally any attempt to recollect any part of any film is considered as one strike.
You could, at your option, pay a ... modest fine instead of receiving the lobotomy.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I imagine a lot of calibration would be needed - though with time that could be automated, unless it's some fundamental wiring difference in the way the data is transmitted.
Would be interesting to see them go the other direction and transmit images into the brain (who needs physical screens?), but that would likely be quite invasive.
Hook me up to this and let my wife plug in a monitor whenever she's around. Then I won't ever have to answer, "What are you thinking?" again!!
She NEVER believes me when I give answers like, "If we give robots hands, will they pick their noses? And would running oil through air intake ducts do the same job as snot?"
Dammit! Those are LEGITIMATE engineering questions, and yet she thinks I'm just making things up. This could just save us the whole argument, and after a while she would just give up and quit asking the stupid question...unless, she had some useful contributions to designing a proper self-cleaning air ingestion system.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Others have already mapped vision to pixels years ago. This variation has more to do with pattern association than biology, and it's not even particularly interesting. Someone just wants more funding for their research.
After the police get tired of reading peoples minds to match their thoughts to the crime, they will recycle old criminals by inserting the memory of the crime into their heads so they always get a guilty plea.
After you read this sentence, I will present a reconstruction of the brain pattern you experienced while reading it, based on a synthesis of a million runs of keys that are closest on the keyboard to the sentence.
a38fe yiu r3eac thytu setbverm I4 xsswi p4rresent 3a qreconsfrrc off tty brtqin ptqttern zyyou experify4ncd whcil reqddingg fitm , bqwesrd on q asyneshtisthef of wq l;ilionf runs of keyewhfs thqt wre clopet ion theh keytbrfrd to the sentbncm,.
Look, Ma, I'm a neuroscientist!
Error 666: Your brain needs to download a missing codec before you can watch this movie
That would be wild to record someone watching Brainstorm, especially if they died.
This study is all over the place and I feel it's saying something that isn't true and never will be.
The technique is much more about matching* brain signals than anything else.Withoutfinal output, the final data, it's got nothing to work from. Sure, it's doing the learning* today so tomorrow it can predict*. But if I imagine something that has never been archived, there's nothing to match from. I feel like 20 years from now there's going to be a catch to it, maybe a statistical limit to the matching.
Again, if I imagine something that has never been imagined, it's going to need some pretty bad ass breakthrough in statistical modeling to convert that shit back to life* for me.
Just to play around, if it's possible toimagine things outside of imagination, the technique won't work. Do we only "see" and "know" from "inside out", from other experiences,as if what we see, what we experience, is an equation,or can we form radically new experiences from "outside in", from unconditional "seeing" and "thinking"?