\t \t\tMind Reading Video Reconstruction\t \t \t \t Jack Gallant \t \t \t A year and a half ago, we published a great feature on the current state of the quest to read the human mind. It included some then in-progress work from Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at U.C. Berkeley, in which Gallant was attempting to reconstruct a video by reading the brain scans of someone who watched that video--essentially pulling experiences directly from someone's brain. Now, Gallant and his team have published a paper on the subject in the journal Current Biology. This is the first taste we've gotten of what the study actually produces. Here's a video of the reconstruction in action: The reconstruction (on the right, obviously) was, according to Gallant, "obtained using only each subject's brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video that did not include the movies used as stimuli. Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately." Don't forget to check out our original feature on this work for some more background into what the researchers would really prefer we call "brain decoding" rather than "mind-reading."
Technology-brain interfaces are the future and these are just the first baby steps in this field. It's been a while since we were able to transmit low resolution images up the optic nerve of people who have lost eyes, but we are still a long way off full technology-brain integration. The amazing (and scary) stuff will come when technology is able to read and write our brains in much the same way as computers do a harddrive, manipulating memory, abilities and sensory input. Control the senses and you control experience, Matrix style. Good post...thanks.
This technology is in its infancy, most neuroscientific research is less than 20 years old and many of the biggest breakthroughs have been in the last decade. Pretty cool what might be possible when this advances...also pretty scary.
Is this for real? Does this mean we'll one day be able to record a video feed straight from our brain and watch everything we've seen throughout the day?
I guess in theory it could be possible to just implant the memories of watching them, rather than waste the time of actually watching them. Maybe they could even apply the same to a two week holiday.
Implanting memories would be a different process. This technique worked by scanning the subject's brains with MRI while they watched Youtube videos and figuring out which areas became active due to specific images and scenes, then comparing that info to their brain activity when watching a new clip and seeing what they had in common. They could use this to do the procedure from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where doctors figure out the exact coordinates of a certain memory and then erase it by destroying the right connections. But forming memories is a complex electro-chemical process and would be much, much harder to map. You would need to find someone who already had the memory, scan their brain to see what other memories and sensory information that memory connected to, locate those areas in the new subject's brain, and then somehow generate the right electrical and chemical stimulation to make the neurons form strong connections between the right areas. Probably possible, but way further down the line. Watching someone's dreams on a TV screen while they sleep is probably realistic within 5 or 10 years, while implanting new memories (please let them call the process "inception") might not happen in our lifetime. I'm guessing, anyway. Who knew scientists would be doing this by 2011?
Read my previous post. I was talking hypothetically, in the future. These kinds of technologies are the first steps in understanding how the brain operates, how it processes information and how it then stores it. This particular technology obviously isn't even close to that...but the implications it could have for future technologies are huge.
Up for discussions, is this truly ethical, for humans to spy into your brain? Watch all the things you seen, all the little laws you may have broken, all the things you picked to forgot, such as terrible past events that occured in your life?
In the hypothetical sense: no, it's absolutely unethical to read people's brains against their will. The mind in the basis of individuality, the soul if you want to get spiritual, and it is the paramount of personal privacy. These techniques could not even be used in court because they would be classified as self-incrimination under the 5th Amendment. In the practical sense: in order to read someone's thoughts with this particular technique, you need to get an fMRI scan of their brain while they are thinking that thought. It is logistically impossible without their cooperation and consent, like trying to hypnotize someone into doing something they don't want to do.
Reminds me of CIA's MK Ultra tactics using psychedelic drugs to hypnotize and control the user for information.
I think it's great, wonderful technology that's positive,not negative. It's not going to lead to machines that can read our thoughts instantly and against our will. As Chief Joseph said, it would have to be done with the subject's consent and actual help to be effective. MelT