But Seriously, Neuroscientists Can Read Your Mind

A research team was able to reconstruct continuous mental images from film clips based on fMRI data.

Neuroscientists have come about as close as they’ve ever been to reading your mind. Researchers at UC Berkley said they’ve been able to reconstruct movie clips from people’s brains. In a study published Friday in Current Biology, the team used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models to decode the brain signals generated by moving pictures. Subjects were subjected to watching trailers on YouTube (the horror!) while fMRI measured blood flow through their visual cortex. Computational models were then able to produce blurry but continuous reconstruction of the movies viewed by the subjects by matching them to their own database of clips. Though there’s still much work to be done, the team is hopeful this step towards reconstructing internal images can be useful someday in reading the minds of those who cannot communicate verbally, like coma patients and Rob Ford.