Dreams Seen By a Man-Made Machine
A few weeks back, The Associated Press ran a story about computers that can record what the brain sees. At present, they have volunteers watching movie clips on YouTube, and this scanner that they have reconstructed roughly what they were seeing by reading the volunteers’ brain activity. It uses MRI technology. The idea is that someday we might gain insight into people’s hallucinations and dreams with this, or improve communication with stroke victims or other patients who have lost more standard means of communication.
These images are pulled from NPR’s website and were originally provided by Shinji Nishimoto of the university of California, Berkeley. As you can see, the images are blurry at this point, but it is working, and how amazingly cool is that?!!
If you’d like to read more about it, NPR’s article can be found here…
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/22/140710447/can-computers-reconstruct-your-dreams
or, another version of the same story can be found here through The Seattle Times…
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2016284558_apusscibrainmovies.html
I will personally feel that this has gone full circle when the volunteers are shown scenes of Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World for this experiment. But, obscure movie references aside, this is some exciting science!