Scientists Create Digital Video by Reconstructing Brains’ Visions

Scientists at UC Berkeley have developed a system that can capture a person’s visual brain activity and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Scientists recently used this system on three different subjects. The subjects were placed inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging system and watched two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers. As the subjects watched the trailers, the fMRI system recorded the subjects’ blood flow through the visual cortex.

The data was fed into a computer program that divided the information into three-dimension pixels units called voxels. As the session continued, the computer gathered more information about how the subjects’ brain activity corresponded with the visual activity of the movie trailers.

Another group of video clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects, and the computer built a database of potential brain activity for each clip. The computer then picked the one hundred clips that caused the subjects’ brain activity to act more similar to when the subjects’ watched the movie trailers. The computer then combined the clips into one final movie. The movie’s resolution is blurry, but it clearly matches the clips viewed by the subjects.

To watch the video clip created by the computer program, seeJesus Diaz, Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment, Gizmodo, Sep. 22, 2011.