Recordable Dreaming Within Our Lifetime?!

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/09/23/1325247/brain-imaging-reveals-the-movies-in-our-mind

"wisebabo sends word that scientists from UC Berkeley have developed a method for scanning brain activity and then constructing video clips that represent what took place in a person's visual cortex (abstract). The technology is obviously quite limited, and "decades" away from any kind of sci-fi-esque thought reading, but it's impressive nonetheless. From the news release:

"[Subjects] watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or 'voxels.' ... The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity. Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject. Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie."

Clip on site.


My graphic programming friend responded:

Most folks know the term "pixel"... the tiny, single squares of color that form a digital image... your cameras take photos in "megapixels". Now learn the term "voxel". Volumetric pixels. Digital photos have an X and Y pixel measurement for size. A voxel would create a 3D image by adding depth, a Z measurement. A cube instead of a square. Holograms! A photo or video viewable from any angle, at any angle. This technique combined with the above link would eventually allow fully 3D immersion in programmable and/or recordable dreams.


So yeah. I really thought this was kinda neat.
I said it before, I'll say it again. Cyberpunk is now!!

I wonder what the effects of constantly consciously programming your own dreams would have on your psyche. It seems like a step way beyond lucid dreaming.

 

this is nothing to be excited about. why would i need this technology? i know what goes on inside my brain without the need to put it on a monitor.

this is yet another technology the world governments will seize to rip away ever-increasingly shrinking privacy the individuals have left. i am glad it is years away, and hopefully this thing will never be realized to any significant level during my lifetime. i do not want to live in the future the way it seems to be going.

 

Remember "Strange Days"?

 

haven't seen it. but i checked it out and seems like something to watch.

 

Quite the cult movie actually .... :2thumbsup:

 

This is kind of funny, they show the test subject a picture of a young black doctor and his brain pictures Mr T. (0:21)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo&t=20s"]Reconstruction from brain activity - YouTube



This got me thinking about an old movie from the 80's about recording and playback of peoples brain experiences:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtwCHfmDQ60"]Brainstorm - Movie Trailer - 1983 - YouTube

 

That is some crazy shit, pretty nifty.
It would be pretty shit at the same time though, someone's going to exploit it.

 

I always thoight this would be interesting as anything!

Hook a VHS type device up to your head and if you dream while sleeping,you can then play it back like your watching a movie..

 

I'm familiar with the sort of research that is involved here, which involves something called functional magnetic resonance imagery (fMRI) and Bayesian machine learning algorithms. The way this was reported in the popular press was misleading and deliberately made to seem more 'gee whiz!' than it actually is.

I'll attempt to explain it in the simplest way possible (warning - hippies who like to think that our minds are immaterial should read no further; it WILL kill your buzz, man).

In brief, fMRI research involves correlating measured brain activity with specific mental states. Functional magnetic resonance imagery technology involves taking something roughly similar to an x-ray of the brain. The images captured indicate what part of the brain is active when we do things.

fMRI researchers accumulate large databases of fMRI images of brains of people doing particular things with the hope that it may allow us to determine what someone is thinking.

As a simple example, imagine we take 100 people, and capture fMRI images of their brains while they look at balls of three different colors; red, blue, and yellow. We now have a database of fMRI images showing what part of the brain of the participants was active when looking at a ball of a particular color. The idea is to then see if we can successfully predict what color ball a person is looking at by comparing their brain activity to the brain images in our database.

Now we have a person come in and look at a ball of a color unknown to the fMRI researcher. The researcher will then use a computer program (the Bayesian machine learning algorithm) to try to guess what color the ball was by comparing their brain image to the images in the database. It essentially compares the new image to existing images and makes a guess based on the best matches (e.g. 'this looks most like a brain looking at a red ball'). The algorithm subsequently uses its past guesses and their accuracy to make better guesses in the future.

Obviously, this can get a lot more complex than simply three differently colored balls, but the principle is the same. In simple terms, in the case reported, they basically took an fMRI image of someone (let's call him Andy) watching a randomly selected YouTube clip. Separately, they took fMRI images of a whole bunch of other people (we'll call them 'the others') watching random YouTube clips. The computer then selected those fMRI images of 'the others' that looked most similar to Andy's and combined the YouTube clips they were looking at into a composite blur and compared it to the clip Andy was watching.

Lo and behold, there is a vague similarity between the composite blur and the frame Andy was actually viewing, but the article makes it seem like they somehow captured a blurry image of Andy's actual mental image, which is EXTREMELY misleading. That blurry thing is just a combination of and lots and lots of YouTube images, not a mental image plucked out of Andy's brain. The article also creates the false impression that the vaguely similar composite blur is typical of their results, and it is not; a lot of the composites they came up with using this methodology looked NOTHING like what Andy was watching.

I'm all for this sort of research mind you (no pun intended) but I find the deliberate distortion of the results in popular press reports... annoying. This sort of research may enable one to guess, in a general way, what a person is dreaming about, but it's not likely to ever let us actually watch your dreams as they unfold. Dreaming is ultimately just a different type of thinking, and fMRI researchers have been working with some degree of success on ways to successfully guess what one is thinking based on an fMRI database for many years, so this technology really isn't a new development.

A more practical application that could come out of this research would be a web browser whereby you search for something online by simply thinking about it instead of typing keywords on a keyboard. It would compare your fMRI to the fMRI of people looking at particular pages and make a guess of what it is you're looking for. In principle, this sort of a search engine could be implemented using existing technology, but would be too cumbersome and cost prohibitive for widespread use. At this stage of the game it would doubtless be frustratingly inaccurate as well. In a decade or so however, some sort of mental search engine probably will exist in some form.

 

But wouldnt it be exciting to actually be able to watch,etc?? (Some dreams ya cant really remember after all)

 

Dude.. Are you seeing life in slow motion?

 

No why buddy??

 

Just the picking conversations where they left off eight years ago, hehe. Made me imagine you as an ent, perhaps.

 

He's time travelling from the eighties. Its years since this thread was active but to him it was only a day or so when he last visited it