Scientists extract images directly from brain (2008)

What they're doing is a high-resolution fMRI scan of V1 (primary visual cortex), a region of the brain that shows a "retinotopic map" of the visual field. It's been known for a while that it's possible to reconstruct an image from V1 activation. What this research shows is that fMRI imaging is now detailed enough to do this non-invasively.<p>Also, something cool about this research, and also a bit scary, is that it's also known that this region is activated by visual recall (a quick search revealed this: <a href="http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=48072" rel="nofollow">http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=48...</a>). I'm not sure if anyone has ever tried to reproduce an image from V1 activation during visual recall, so I don't know if it would be a coherent image. My guess is it would though, in which case an fMRI scan could detect an image of an "N" if you asked the person to picture the letter.<p>Pretty cool.

My big question would be whether the patterns that they're detecting in the brain are similar for different people? For example, if I imagine an apple, do my "brain patterns" resemble someone else's when they also think of an apple? If not, seems like training this device would be a pain in the ass, because you'd have to do it for each person. But if so...imagine a huge resource of patterns for different thoughts, feelings, mental pictures, etc. Hopefully this comment makes sense...

On one hand, this is great. It will lead to new technology which will inevitably lead to better video games.<p>On the other hand, this provides the opportunity for total loss of privacy. Forget freedom of speech, people might start to attack the freedom to think certain thoughts. In other news, China and Iran are thrilled at this new science.

Not to impugn the author's trustworthiness, but this is so astounding to me that I find it somewhat incredible. Does anyone have an English-language news source for this?<p>The "extracted" pictures are an order of magnitude clearer than I would have thought possible.

Seems like it's a neural network trying to decipher the inner workings of another neural network. How amazingly cool is that ?

There were interesting comments about this when it was posted here before:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394826" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=394826</a>

I think if I could see any invention in my lifetime, I'd want to see that knowledge-uploader thing from 'The Matrix'. Imagine how much you could learn! Especially before you were too old to use it...

The source for this article is a 404 page. (Translated via Google) <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chunichi.co.jp%2Farticle%2Fnational%2Fnews%2FCK2008121102000053.html&#38;sl=ja&#38;tl=en&#38;hl=en&#38;ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chu...</a>

Questions:<p>- Will the fMRI patterns for the same image be the same for two different people?<p>- When I think of images, the vision I have in my mind are not as vivid as when I see them directly. Given this, will the fMRI patterns be the same in both cases?

I can see this being amazingly handy in the (far) future in terms of interface navigation and search. Just picture the icon of the program you want to launch, or the stock photo you are trying to find and boom.

This should be like front page news. This is something many would have not thought possible. It also poses many problems non-materialists that do not subscribe to a weird hand-wavy coincidentalism.

Hooray! So now I can download the porn images I saw elsewhere back to my laptop directly from my brain! This way you get all the porn mags for free!