Guess all those sci-fi thrillers in which people could tap into
the movies unspooling in other people’s heads — think
‘Brainstorm,’ ‘Dreamscape,’ ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Total Recall,’ ‘The
Cell’ and ‘Inception’ — weren’t all that far-fetched. Scientists
at the University of California at Berkeley have figured out how
to reconstruct the movies people see in their minds. In a new
study published in the journal Current Biology, the researchers
recount how they showed subjects Hollywood movie trailers, used
MRI scanners and computational models to record the brain
activity associated with each image, then worked backwards and
used the patterns of brain activity to predict and recreate the
images that subjects were watching. Similar experiments have
been done before with static images, but this is the first time
scientists have succeeded with moving images. As the video below
indicates, the computer model’s predictive ability is still very
crude. The scientists say we’re still decades away from being
able to use the tec