Scientists Reconstruct Video Clips From Brain Activity In Historic Experiment - Polidicks

[quote]UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in their brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. [b]Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.[/b] I just can't believe this is happening for real, but according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—"this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds." Indeed, this is mindblowing. I'm simultaneously excited and terrified. This is how it works: They used three different subjects for the experiments (incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires to be inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at time and nobody wanted that job). Inside the machine, they 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 activity. As the sessions progressed, the computer kept learning about how the visual patterns presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity. After recording this information, the activity from the second group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects on a computer screen. 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 looked more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into the final movie. Although the movie is low res and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects. In this other video you can see how this process worked in the three people. On the top left you can see the movie the subjects were watching while they were in the fMRI machine. Right below you can see the movie "extracted" from their brain activity, which shows that this technique gives consistent results independently of the human or content. The three lines of clips next to the left column show the random movies that the computer program used to reconstruct the visual information. Right now, it's low res and imprecise, but the potential is enormous. Lead research author and one of the lab test bunnies Shinji Nishimoto thinks this is the first step to tap directly into what our brain sees and imagines: Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie. In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences. That will include your visual memories and dreams. This is the first time in history that we have been able to decode brain activity and reconstruct motion pictures in a computer screen. The path that this research opens boggles the mind. It reminds me of Brainstorm, the cult movie in which a group of scientists lead by Christopher Walken develops a machine capable of recording the five senses of a human being and then play them back into the brain itself. This new development brings us closer to that goal which, I have no doubt, will happen at one point. Given the exponential increase in computing power and our understanding of human biology, I think this will arrive sooner than most mortals expect. Perhaps one day you would be able to go to sleep with a Sony Dreamcam connected wrapped around your head like a beanie. [/quote] [video=youtube;nsjDnYxJ0bo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo[/video] [URL=http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-reconstruct-video-clips-from-brain-activity]Source[/URL] If this is real then holy shit

But those dirty thoughts were meant to be for my private use only :(

Kinda creepy

That is...fucking terrifying.

Dream of Emma Watson and another babe go at it. Wake up and watch. Repeat Repeat Repeat

Holy fuck.

Why does the brain activity clip have :foxnews: up in the corner from 0:23 to 0:25.

There are random words in the video for some reason like "record" I find that a bit strange. At the 0:14 mark you can see several words such as the example i provided above.[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/wRuVm.png[/IMG]

Think to yourself

I watched the video, some of the stuff didn't look accurate. Like a girl is shown on the brain, it shows a guy. But holy fuck if this comes alive I will jizz my balls empty.

[QUOTE=finbe;32436075]There are random words in the video for some reason like "record" I find that a bit strange. At the 0:14 mark you can see several words such as the example i provided above.[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/wRuVm.png[/IMG][/QUOTE] It looks like a captcha.

-then I read it-

At the 0:12 mark you can see that some people literally have watermarks embedded into their brain. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/PjiSY.png[/IMG] :v: [editline]22nd September 2011[/editline] I'm thinking about [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/s1o6I.png[/IMG]

[QUOTE=finbe;32436133]At the 0:12 mark you can see that some people literally have watermarks embedded into their brain. [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/PjiSY.png[/IMG] :v: [editline]22nd September 2011[/editline] I'm thinking about [IMG]http://i.imgur.com/s1o6I.png[/IMG][/QUOTE] Fucking brain and its DRM.

i want to someday find out how fucked up my subconscious is

Snip

Oh shit I am intrigued but I may be horrified by what I find.

That is fucking horrifying. Am I the only one who finds this creepy as fuck? Reminds me of the video in The Ring too. [editline]23rd September 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=windwakr;32436318]The video isn't what they actually captured from the brain, it's random shit off of youtube that could generate similar brain activity. That why you see those watermarks. Description on the Youtube video, more easy to understand than the article: I'm not that impressed by this.[/QUOTE] How is this not impressing? The algorithm alone is stunning.

huh kinda like that movie source code, except shittier

From the way I'm reading all the information they have up, the system is basically using the brain activity as a search engine for matching similar images. That's a really dumbed down description though as it's more about how the brain is processing the image it's seeing and not consciously searching a library. A computer just infers what would produce the closest brain activity in order of closeness. Really interesting!

[QUOTE=windwakr;32436318]The video isn't what they actually captured from the brain, it's random shit off of youtube that could generate similar brain activity. That why you see those watermarks. Description on the Youtube video, more easy to understand than the article: I'm not that impressed by this.[/QUOTE]More specifically, they had a computer "learn" from actual brain activity, then had the same computer do this.

Awesome now I can finally perfect lucid dreaming, i've tried all sorts of techniques but they haven't worked. Wonder what my subconscious is like.

That is creepy as all hell.

Holy fucking shit this is so awesome! I've never seen anything like this!!

I wonder. If that video was constructed using a library of YouTube videos and brain activity information from watching a separate video, then could you essentially "record" a dream by producing a similar video from the brain activity monitored during a dream?

Paprika suddenly became just one step more real.

It's like the brain always has some kind of image going on and when one is presented to it, it gets mixed up with all the others even if they aren't related. I've noticed that when looking at text there were faces in the background. [editline]23rd September 2011[/editline] [QUOTE=-TheWolf-;32437301]I wonder. If that video was constructed using a library of YouTube videos and brain activity information from watching a separate video, then could you essentially "record" a dream by producing a similar video from the brain activity monitored during a dream?[/QUOTE] I'm pretty sure that's exactly what this is testing. The possibility of recording imagery of thoughts from the brain.

This can either be good as bad. Good because I can re-live some of the memorable times with my times with my ex, but bad because it makes lying a lot harder... EDIT: I see how this works. It's quite interesting. It's not a literal view of visual memory, but more of a "best fit match" from existing imagery. This won't necessarily be able to fully reconstruct what someone has seen, only a "best-fit" match. Of course that's only using current technology. It's entirely possible to meld this completely with computer rendering some time in the future to reproduce a near exact picture of what someone has seen.

Technically, didn't this thing reconstruct brain activity from video clips?

[QUOTE=ECrownofFire;32437429]Technically, didn't this thing reconstruct brain activity from video clips?[/QUOTE] Kind of and kind of not. From my understanding it was using the brain activity to find the next best matches. It's like a reverse image search except using the brain activity stimulated by one image and matching it to what would produce the closest activity in order of relevance.