Images transferred directly from your brain to a computer

[•Lindsay•]

Yeah (http://www.pinktentacle.com/2008/12/scientists-extract-images-directly-from-brain/).

This is... unreal. How long until you will be able to record every image in your brain? Even your dreams?

[Straight Edge Ryan]

It's all fascinating stuff to be sure, but I'm uneasy with anything messing with peoples brains. Granted, taking a class on the brain and psychology doesn't make me anywhere near an expert in these fields, but it seems like if they could take things out of your brain, they could probably put things in it

I dunno if anyone read about another study scientists were working on a few months back about the ability to erase certain memories from peoples brains, but it seems to me like those types of things just open up too many frightening possibilities. Just think you could read about something like "millions dead in military accident" and then all of a sudden *poof* "what accident? millions never died, didn't you know that?". Not that I think that the worlds gonna become some sort of Orwellian dystopia anytime soon, but you see what I'm saying

[•Lindsay•]

It's all fascinating stuff to be sure, but I'm uneasy with anything messing with peoples brains. Granted, taking a class on the brain and psychology doesn't make me anywhere near an expert in these fields, but it seems like if they could take things out of your brain, they could probably put things in it

I dunno if anyone read about another study scientists were working on a few months back about the ability to erase certain memories from peoples brains, but it seems to me like those types of things just open up too many frightening possibilities. Just think you could read about something like "millions dead in military accident" and then all of a sudden *poof* "what accident? millions never died, didn't you know that?". Not that I think that the worlds gonna become some sort of Orwellian dystopia anytime soon, but you see what I'm sayingInteresting to think about, but translating the mind into digital information is not the same as rearranging it. The brain is more than just electrical signals, it's complex and every brain has it's own unique chemistry. To systematically edit the brain you would need to understand how a thought is created and because we are human it is possible that nobody will ever have the ability to objectively understand themselves.

But that reminds me of a story I read about a world in which everyone's brain is hooked up to a computer that sends a loud disorientating signal to anyone who has an intelligent thought. I forget what it was called.

I just found it. (http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html)

How long until I can upload my entire brain onto a computer? Then I'll live well past my physical death until some jerk deletes me. I'm trying to achieve my dream of becoming grafted to a couch.

[chriskot]

I read an article about that this morning and it blew my mind! The technology may be in it's infancy, but it is ridiculously amazing. Replacing my dream log with a dream photo-album? Yes please!

There's one awesome thing that nobody seems to be talking about though. Everyone seems to be talking about what we could LOOK AT with it, but not what we could SEE. Images that get sent to the brain go through massive amounts of compression and processing. What the computer will show most of the time probably won't be exactly what the person is looking at. If a person simply ignores details of a scene, will they show up in the picture? What about if the person is looking at an optical illusion or a stereogram? Dreams may be vivid sometimes, but will they really show up exactly the same way as pictures fed from the eyes? Those pictures of the letters from the article- how much of that noise is from the roughness of the technology and how much is from the brain itself?

A fun fact about your eyes: They're always twitching really, really quickly. If something stays still too long in your vision, your brain attempts to remove it from your sight. You know when the optometrist shines that light into your eye and you wonder why you can see the veins in your eyeball? Turns out that you're always looking at them, but your brain ignores them unless they seem to move or change (like they do when the flashlight illuminates them).

There are huge possibilities here for research into everything from optometry, to neuroscience, to psychology. If this technology actually gets anywhere (and I sincerely hope that it does), the near future is going to be even crazier than I previously expected. Announcements like this make me giddy.

Side note: In a hypothetical future where everyone has a machine that can take these sorts of pictures, I predict that there is going to be an explosively popular new genre of art where creative/hallucinating/dreaming people sell prints of their (mostly mad and twisted) visions. Like abstract photography or something. And it will be spectacular.

[Opilione]

I really don't want this.

Using a mediated and limited tool at least stops the really nasty shit from getting out of there.

[•Lindsay•]

Dreams may be vivid sometimes, but will they really show up exactly the same way as pictures fed from the eyes?My dreams are unusual because they are always more vivid than reality. I never paint my dreams because that is far beyond my abilities. So I'd love to have a computer do the work for me.

I think the computer would transcribe your interpretation of the image, because the image has to go through your brain first. If the computer recorded the signals that are sent from your eyes, things would get weird. Everything would be upside-down. (When you are born, everything you see is upside-down until your brain learns to compensate). And it would be very difficult to distinguish one thing from another thing. People who are blind at birth but regain their vision later in life never learn how to see, because even when they have the physical ability to see their brain never learns how to interpret the colors and shapes.

[chriskot]

I dunno if anyone read about another study scientists were working on a few months back about the ability to erase certain memories from peoples brains, but it seems to me like those types of things just open up too many frightening possibilities. Just think you could read about something like "millions dead in military accident" and then all of a sudden *poof* "what accident? millions never died, didn't you know that?". Not that I think that the worlds gonna become some sort of Orwellian dystopia anytime soon, but you see what I'm saying
I vaguely remember that article. I think it was done with some sort of chemical. They were talking about how useful it would be for relieving people of PTSD and other things associated with traumatic memories, or something like that. I can definitely see where you're coming from, but I think that we're still a very long ways off from being able to do this sort of memory-replacing things involuntarily. Most of these experiments with the brain either involve intense concentration on the subject's part, or a long period to study that particular subject's brain (since everyone's brain is laid out slightly differently). Usually both. While they might find some way to make it easier on themselves in the future, for now I don't think that Big Brother would be able to easily mind-wipe a population when he has to spend several hours with each individual person.

[CruShTinbOX]

Wow, this is crazy. I remember seeing the Final Fantasy movie and the dream recorder was one of the coolest things in the movie. I remember thinking "that would be amazing if we actually had that technology", and now here we are. Even if it's only in it's infancy, this is amazing.

[J Wilson]

Really? The person involved "thought" in the same font as the flashcards? I'm not sure about this. There's so much going on in our brains, and in our thoughts it seems like it would be pretty damn hard to isolate what you are looking for, let alone get a clear picture of something that most people are not seeing very clearly anyways.

As artists, I think we all realize that people don't "think" with as much detail as they think they do. It's partly why young artists say things like "I can see it so clearly in my head, but I can't draw it." No, you don't actually see it in your head very clearly at all. I don't think art would be very good at all straight from your head, and even mind reading would be pretty generalized and may not mean the same thing to an observer as it would to the person in question.

If this is in any way legit, it's still pretty startling though.

[nickmarshallvfx]

I agree completely with J Wilson on this. The point about the font is interesting, and yes, people generally dont see thigns in their head as clearly as they think. In actuality, they feel the emotion from it, which is very difficult to transfer to pixel form.
I would love to be able to record my dreams tho! I could have an amazing dream where i spend a long passionate night with.. i dunno... Jessica Alba, and then watch it the next day! Great! Would her lawyers sue me if i burned it to dvd and sold it though? lol

Nah this seems like possibly the scariest thing i have ever heard. Imagine the new age lie detectors! Tap straight into people's thoughts, no hiding those! If we can do this and improve the technology, it could be the beginning of the end...

Nick

[TASmith]

Last night I dreamed a bordercollie released the parking brake of my parents Camry, sending it reeling off a cliff into the sea below. And I had to swim down there to save the dog. It'd make for some interesting photos.

[birdsatemyface]

It sounds like it could be useful in capturing assailants and criminals if they could narrow it down to certain memories in a person's mind. I suppose the need for sketch artists would decline, though.

[HunterKiller_]

Agree with J Wilson on this one.

Amazing nonetheless, but it's gonna be while before this thing goes beyond simple black and white images, and even when it does reach more capacity, as J Wilson said, the images in most people's minds would be far to uncertain to be captured.

[Redmond]

Impressive. However, if I read the article right, this only works with what the person is seeing. Not what they are thinking.

[Slash]

That is SO COOL! I want one!

[Samurai_em]

Reminds of of that show where they use computers to read the minds of murder victims in order to figure out who killed them and why, and one of the detectives sleeps with bulletproof vest on (so you have to shoot for his head) and a gun (so if he is going to die, he can blow his head off) in order to prevent anyone from being able to read his mind after he is dead.

[Robert.B]

This is fucking amazing! I used to wish stuff like this was real when in was a kid so that I could show my familly why I always woke up screaming..... ...wait.. .

[Clodioz]

http://www.neoteo.com/Portals/0/imagenes/cache/58DFx250y200.jpg

http://www.pinktentacle.com/images/neuron.jpg


I'll finally find the girl of my dreams 8)

fuckingaweosome new :D

[Clodioz]

http://img19.picoodle.com/img/img19/3/12/11/f_2m_c22a5f5.gif

http://img19.picoodle.com/img/img19/3/12/11/f_cat3m_3f220e4.gif

http://img19.picoodle.com/img/img19/3/12/11/f_t1m_0fdc85d.gif

wow, I read in another forum that scientists are able to extract images from brain since 1999... in that year they used 16x16px images :O

[Blue]

So, how long until digital art will be reduced to "thinking" an image?

[SoufMeng]

If it ever happened to be so, fortunately, it would hardly make it easier for artists to make good art...

[TASmith]

it'd be fun though, to try.

[Black Spot]

I sometimes dream about painting, especially when I’ve had a problem (damn mushroom) and think it would make a great documentary.

The extra anus at the back of my neck I’d like to forget.

[ArtZealot]

I wonder if they will ever figure out how to use this technology on the brain of the deceased. Kind of a scary thought...

[daestwen]

I wonder if they will ever figure out how to use this technology on the brain of the deceased. Kind of a scary thought...

Er, well, they could try but they wouldn't get anything. No electrical signals in a dead brain.

[s.ketch]

Er, well, they could try but they wouldn't get anything. No electrical signals in a dead brain.

There can be electrical signals up to 36 hours after death. Probably just random discharge, but could be something interesting none the less.

[Elwell]

There can be electrical signals up to 36 hours after death.
Source?

[s.ketch]

http://www.medopedia.com/body-after-death

This says "Electroencephalography (EEG) can sometimes detect spurious electrical impulses in the brain even after apparent death."

But then there is brain death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_death#Medical_criteria).

Maybe I was thinking about the body in general when it comes to postmortem twitching and stuff but I replaced body with brain. Next time I will collect at least five sources and place them in MLA format as to not seem like I talk out of my ass 95% of the time. ;)

[Cthogua]

I don't know if any of you watch Fringe, but this is like almost exactly what they did in a few episodes...albeit overdone for a near sci-fi narrative. Retrieve the last image seen by the brain before death, interrogation of newly dead bodies. I honestly had no idea technology like this was as far along as it is.

But yeah I have to agree with J Wilson, seeing something and reproducing it is alot different than "seeing" it in your minds eye. Perhaps not necessarily in a biological sense, but the images from my dreams seem so ephemeral, shifting, a picture of it might not even make any sense outside of the context of the dream.

Ok, because of my particular interests...I have to wonder if such a device could eventually be used to reproduce what is "seen" by the schizophrenic, or by someone on hallucinogens, or someone having a mystical/religious experience. Often times mental images in altered states of consciousness have the same "loose" quality about them as dream images and are slippery to get hold of exactly what the vision "was" Still I think I'd be pretty damn interesting. I had an experience with Salvia Divinorum (still legal) in which "I" slipped back from my awareness of the "real" world, but I could see as I slipped back that my "awareness" was actually just a hexagonal membranous window that I was connected too via a twisted chord, and that there was an endless number of other hexagonal membrane windows connected in nearly all directions forming what I understood to be an encapsulation of what we call "objective reality" and that there was this sort of endless black space behind me in which I felt the vague notion that my "family" was waiting there for me...not my biological family though. I wonder how the brain imager thinggy would reconstruct that? The images of the hexagonal grid and a chord connecting me to the surface of my membrane were pretty clear, however the things like "infinite black space" would look pretty silly as a print out. However, maybe soon we'll have in-brain parallax so based on a series of pictures a computer could extrapolate a 3 dimensional scene from the info.....THAT will be wild.

mind imager + DMT = :anime:

[Prometheus|ANJ]

Some speculate that the 'I' is merely a user of the brain 'wetware', a bit like how the user of a computer can focus on a simple but important task without knowing anything about complicated computers. During dreaming, the I is passive, taking part in simulations run by the wetware (defragging perhaps). When we're awake, the I needs to be in control, and the imagination is suppressed to areas where it can be useful.

Sometimes my dreams can be really elaborate, involving complicated plots and very fleshes out characters which completely take me by surprise. At these time it's obvious that 'I' is something much smaller than what my brain wetware is capable of.

When I experience lucid dreaming I can use all that processing power to direct the simulations. It's like having your own Star Trek HoloDeck. It's pretty amazing how much more powerful my imagination is at these times.

There's really no way to predict what the future will look like, if things like this can be taken further, to brain-machine interfaces.

[m@.]

Well I think this experiment is misleading, especially the headline (damn sensationalism): it is not extracting images from your brain... it is just comparing your brain activity when you are watching different stuff, so it's more related to direct visual stimuli than to imagination, which are very different. Imagination works with concepts, not visual stimuli...

Those pictures of the letters are not extracted from the brain, they are reconstructed by comparison. You could pretty much do that kind of experiment with anything. Measure someone's pupil dilatation when watching different luminosities. And then only watch the pupil dilatation without knowing the luminosity. And there you go you can deduct what kind of luminosities the person was watching, and create a picture of that luminosity by drawing the corresponding shade of grey by comparing it to the earlier benchmark. But it doesn't mean you directly "see" the mental image of the person.

The only thing that makes the brain experiment sound cool is that it is measuring something inside of the brain instead of outside. But it's still just comparing the effect of direct visual stimuli and creating those pictures "outside" of the brain by comparing with benchmarks.