fMRI + computer reconstruct what’s going in people’s minds!

[Sheila]

Computer Reconstructs Movie Scenes From Brain Scans

Huff Post
by Malcolm Ritter
22 Sep 11

It sounds like science fiction: While volunteers watched movie clips, a scanner watched their brains. And from their brain activity, a computer made rough reconstructions of what they viewed.

Scientists reported that result Thursday and speculated such an approach might be able to reveal dreams and hallucinations someday.

In the future, it might help stroke victims or others who have no other way to communicate, said Jack Gallant, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper.

He believes such a technique could eventually reconstruct a dream or other made-up mental movie well enough to be recognizable. But the experiment dealt with scenes being viewed through the eyes at the time of scanning, and it's not clear how much of the approach would apply to scenes generated by the brain instead, he said….

Check out the amazing video clip of the fMRI / computer-generated images from people’s brains --

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/0..._n_976580.html

[Luc]

The progress in this area is mind-blowing. Kinda in that vein (talking of technology/computers) - as Michio Kaku (the famous phycisist) said (I'm paraphrazing him a bit) - "What the future generations will be capable of, now would be considered pure magic".

If I told anybody 20 years ago that after clicking on this "thing similar to a typing machine" we can tap into basically entire human knowledge in an instant, they would accuse me of sorcery (or being crazy).

In 1997, Garri Kasparov was defeated by the super-computer Deep Blue





Then we had the supercomputer "Watson" winning in Jeopardy (a year ago?)



and





This one you will find enjoyable;




Talking of chatbots - it can clearly be seen that their "personality", which in their case is just an algorithm, is an almost direct representation of the software specialists' personalities.

All is progressing exponentially (as Raymond Kurzweil, among others, predicted).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity