Mindblowning

It sounds like science fiction, but the scientists at Berkley have shown that they can use images generated by fMRI to reconstruct the images that are seen with the eyes after the signal has been interpreted in the brain. This kind of technology can open many doors wide open. It could even change internet phones down the line to a point where we can communicate to people about what we see just by looking at it.

Researchers created a computer model that describes how visual information translates as brain activity, then applied it to each "brain voxel." As volunteers watched the first set of movie clips, their brain activity was processed by the computer to "learn" to associate visual patterns in the clips with corresponding brain activity. Brain activity from viewing the second set of clips was then used to test the computer's reconstruction algorithm—the computer used 18 million seconds (5,000 hours) of random YouTube videos that didn't include the movies viewed by the test subjects to build a kind of "reference library," correlating the brain imagery with video clip imagery. In the final step, the computer selected the 100 clips that were most like the ones the subjects had watched and combined them to form a movie.