Researchers from UC Berkeley were able to reconstruct YouTube videos from viewers' brain activity -- a feat that might one day offer a glimpse into our dreams, memories and even fantasies. For the experiment, subjectsthe researchers themselvesspent hours lying still inside a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, watching two sets of movie trailers. During the first set, recorded brain activity was fed into a computer to program a "movie reconstruction algorithm," which matched neural activity to what was taking place in the video. Subtle changes in blood flow to visual areas of the brain, measured by functional MRI, predicted what was on the screen at the time -- whether it was Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau or an airplane. Subjects then watched the same set of trailers as the algorithm pieced together a video based on brain activity recorded by the MRI. Shinji Nishimoto, a neuroscientist in Gallant's lab and the study's lead author, said the results shed light on how the brain understands and processes visual experiences. "In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences."
– Scientists at UC Berkeley have made a major advancement in the field of mind reading, reconstructing YouTube videos based on brain scans from people who’d seen them. Researchers would put subjects into an MRI machine and track their brain activity as they viewed videos. Once they’d build a model of how a subject’s mind processed the video, “we could read brain activity for that subject and run it backward … to try to uncover what the viewer saw,” one study coauthor tells ABC News. Using the scans they were then able to reproduce the videos—though they’re blurry. “This is a major leap,” the co-author says. He thinks the technique could eventually be used to reconstruct dreams or memories, if it turns out the brain processes those things similarly to how it processes movies. “It’s our next line of research.” (More details on how the experiment worked, along with a video, at PC Magazine.)