…has been a staple of every low-budget piece of celluloid skiffy going back at least to that early-sixties Gerry-Anderson puppet show Stingray<\/i> (which no one with any dignity will admit to having watched, although I clearly remember the episode with the mind-reading chair). The Prisoner<\/i> also featured an episode in which No. 6’s dreams could be probed, and the various incarnations of Star Trek<\/i> must have had a half-dozen such episodes among them although they all seem to run together after awhile (the episode I’m thinking of had aliens with bumpy foreheads; does that help at all?).<\/p>\n
Now here comes Kendrick Kay and his buddies in Nature<\/i> with “Identifying natural images from human brain activity<\/a>“, and if they haven’t actually vindicated all those cheesy narrative gimmicks, they’ve made a damn good first pass at it. They used fMRI scans to infer which one of 120 possible novel images a subject was looking at. “Novel” is important: the system trained up front on a set of nearly 2,000 images to localize the receptive fields, but none of those were used in the actual mind-reading test. So we’re not talking about simply recognizing a simple replay of a previously-recorded pattern here. Also, the images were natural<\/i>\u2014 landscapes and still-lifes and snuff porn, none of this simplified star\/circle\/wavey-lines bullshit. <\/p>\n The system looked into the minds of its subjects, and figured out what they were looking at with accuracies ranging from 32% to 92%. While the lower end of that range may not look especially impressive, remember that random chance would yield an accuracy of 0.8%. These guys are on to something.<\/p>\n Of course, they’re not there yet. The machine only had 120 pictures to choose from; tagging a card from a known deck is a lot easier than identifying an image you’ve never seen before. But Kay et al<\/i> are already at work on that; they conclude “it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person\u2019s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone.” And in a recent interview<\/a> Kay went further, suggesting that a few decades down the road, we’ll have machines that can read dreams<\/i>.<\/p>\n He was good enough to mention that we might want to look into certain privacy issues before that happens…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …has been a staple of every low-budget piece of celluloid skiffy going back at least to that early-sixties Gerry-Anderson puppet show Stingray (which no one with any dignity will admit to having watched, although I clearly remember the episode with the mind-reading chair). The Prisoner also featured an episode in which No. 6’s dreams could […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,10,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-neuro","category-relevant-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}