Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: thedoc on 23/09/2011 11:02:08
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Using an MRI scanner to read their brain activity, scientists have successfully decoded and then reconstructed the visual images experienced by volunteers viewing a sequence of Hollywood movies.
Read the whole story on our website by clicking here (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/news-archive/news/2389/)
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This seems to validate a pet theory of mine, that there is a one-to-one correspondence between our experiences and our emotions. The article seems to say that the emotions recorded during the subject's experience were reproduced in subsequent experiences, letting the computer infer what the experience was from the emotions detected by the MRI.
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Getting inside someone's head to interpret what they are dreaming about would in a way be an invasion of people's privacy. Dreams are a private matter. As long as technologies like this are used for something good it's OK. But there's a danger of such techniques being abused.
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This seems to validate a pet theory of mine, that there is a one-to-one correspondence between our experiences and our emotions. The article seems to say that the emotions recorded during the subject's experience were reproduced in subsequent experiences, letting the computer infer what the experience was from the emotions detected by the MRI.
It wasn't so much emotions as direct neuronal responses to the applied stimulus. The computer is correlating which groups of neurones repond reproducibly to certain aspect of the moving visual world.
Then the equation is reversed and the question "if I know what pattern of neuronal activity was displayed, can I work backwards to recreate what the subject must have seen?"
This is what they've done, with breathtaking effect...
Jack Gallant will be on this week's show to talk about the work.
Chris
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This is awesome!
I wish however people would read the article thoroughly before jumping to conclusions.