Watch Your Thoughts
It would be so much easier to replay dreams, record thoughts and communicate without speaking. But this type of futuristic technology was always thought to be a dream of a far away future or the plot of a science fiction movie.
Hollywood Movie clip (L), fMRI image of same clip (R)
Researchers at University of California Berkeley have figured out how to scan the brain and produce blurry images based on thought patterns. Just as a television image is comprised of pixels, these neuroscientists have discovered that images that begin as thoughts in the brain are composed of 3-D voxels.
The scanning equipment and the playback are definitely in their infancy with each producing crude renditions of what’s actually happening. But it is a start. Even blurry, somewhat confusing images of thoughts can be useful for interpreting dreams or filling in forgotten thoughts or memories.
But doctors have a much more practical use in mind — helping stroke patients and others who can’t communicate by speaking.
Routine use of this technology is decades away. But a brain cap captured the very first image that corresponded to a thought just a couple of years ago. And now we have full pictures of blurry images with a pretty good level of accuracy. With thoughtful focus on this area of neuroscience improving resolution and voxel quality could be just a matter of someone dreaming a little bigger.
Personally, I’d like to set my DVR to record my dreams so I could watch them back each morning. Wouldn’t you?
Here’s the experiment the Berkeley team conducted by reconstructing brain images from YouTube videos and movie trailers.
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