The video's not fake. I'm not too sure about reality, though. It's been a long day; I'm probably asleep in my desktop chair right now, dreaming about making this thread.

And then there's the FTL thing from a few hours ago. Yeah, nothing is real today.

[quote="http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity":4eaea]UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

[The team] used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain's blood flow through their brains' visual cortex.

The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity.

After recording this information, another group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie. Although the resulting fukn is low resolution and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects.

Given a big enough database of video material and enough computing power, the system would be able to match any images in your brain.

Words "context advertising" refused to go away from my head while I was watching and reading this stuff :D

I'll stay away from serious commencting though.

Interesting.

I'll never need a TV or porn ever again!

I might look into this after I finish my research on cosmic time travel.

Welcome to real life, the government was bound to eventually find out how to read peoples minds.

Corin wrote:

Welcome to real life, the government was bound to eventually find out how to read peoples minds.

UC Berkely =/= government

foulcoon wrote:

Corin wrote:

Welcome to real life, the government was bound to eventually find out how to read peoples minds.

UC Berkely =/= government

Yeah but you know the fagging government is going to get their hands on it.

It looks like the "videos" shown are a merge of other, previously recorded videos, correlated to the effects those other videos had on the brain.

This is creepy and I'm probably going to die before they figure it out anyways.

mm201 wrote:

It looks like the "videos" shown are a merge of other, previously recorded videos, correlated to the effects those other videos had on the brain.

I was thinking the same. The brain obviously processes several different things at once, so it makes sense that it'd overlay visual imagery like that.

It would be interesting to see how different people's mental output would show as a video, especially for those with eidetic memory (and the opposite). This is pretty inspiring, if creepy-looking, stuff.

Enter conspiracy theories.

So basically the output are digital videos that seem to be from the perspective of a you with some terrible agnosia.

Interesting.

D33d wrote:

mm201 wrote:

It looks like the "videos" shown are a merge of other, previously recorded videos, correlated to the effects those other videos had on the brain.

I was thinking the same. The brain obviously processes several different things at once, so it makes sense that it'd overlay visual imagery like that.

It would be interesting to see how different people's mental output would show as a video, especially for those with eidetic memory (and the opposite). This is pretty inspiring, if creepy-looking, stuff.

I think you've misunderstood how the experiment works. Their brains are processing the exact same image shown to the left. The right image is a reconstruction made using an enormous archive of random YouTube videos that other test subjects have already watched. The clips chosen are the ones whose recorded brain activity match most closely with the brain activity of the subjects watching the clips on the left.

This obviously restricts reconstruction to things that have already been filmed, but if we could figure out why certain images result in certain types of visual activity, we could reconstruct mental images from scratch.

I'm sure running a sufficiently long Bayesian analysis would produce sufficiently generic forms to match most kinds of data.
This setup requires the subject be placed inside an MRI, so don't expect Big Brother to get this technology any time soon.

"Wow, Brian! This looks fun! Let's see what YOUR dreams are like!"
". . ."
". . . oh. . . oh God."

the "human" pictures are much more clearly defined than the others (airplane, bird, etc), which is interesting.

Experimental bias. Youtube has a much larger pool of videos featuring people.
It also has a tendency to change horizontal lines into pieces of text for a similar reason.