Researchers Reconstruct Images From Brain Activity [Video]

Neuroscientists from the Gallant Lab at the University of California, Berkeley have demonstrated brain activity in a visual format, by reconstructing clips of what research subjects had been watching. Their study ‘Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies’ was published last week in the journal Current Biology. The researchers showed people Hollywood movie trailers while they were inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine (fMRI). The machine took scans as they watched for two hours.

A new computer model decoded the brain imaging data they collected and they were then able to transform the data into video again by matching the brain scans with the closest moving images from a database of random video clips. The reconstructions were approximations of what the subjects were watching and although blurry, are impressive in how accurate they are. A much larger library of random clips would enable the researchers to create clearer results.

Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley