Scientists translate dreams into YouTube videos

Gallant Labs UC Berkeley, Wisdom Quarterly, The Consumerist

(GallantLabUCB) Left clip: segment of Hollywood movie trailer subject viewed while in fMRI machine. Right clip: reconstruction of segment from brain activity measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Translating brain activity into YouTube videos
Phil Villarreal (The Consumerist, Sept. 26, 2011)

BERKELEY, California - Science is getting closer to letting people see through the eyes of others. UC Berkeley scientists have designed a way to read brain activity and reconstruct YouTube videos.... broadcasting the mental images people create, meaning you could soon watch others' dreams.

• It would be amazing to hook up Buddhist saints (Noble Ones) or at least monastics and asking them to meditate or "see" nirvana. We know those who have seen it exist.

(Meggito/Flickr)

The Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley had people watch videos while hooked up to an MRI machine, then matched the data and brain activity to shapes, movement, and colors. The computer model the researchers created blurry, dreamlike images. More

• AUDIO: SCPR's Patt Morrison to cover topic in depth
  
• Now you can see images from someone else's mind
• UC Scientists "see" images in people's minds (ABC News)

Procedure
1. Record brain activity while subject views hours of movie trailers.

2. Build dictionaries (regression model) to translate between shapes, edges, and motion in these movies and measured brain activity. A separate dictionary is constructed for each of several thousand points in the brain at which brain activity was measured.
3. Record brain activity to a new set of movie trailers that will be used to test the quality of the dictionaries and reconstructions.

4. Build a random library of approximately 18,000,000 seconds of video downloaded at random from YouTube (that have no overlap with the movies subjects saw in the magnet).
5. Put each of these clips through the dictionaries to generate predictions of brain activity.
6. Select the 100 clips whose predicted activity is most similar to the observed brain activity.
7. Average those clips together. This is the reconstruction.

• See related video. See the related (Nishimoto et al., 2011, Current Biology) scientific paper. More information: gallantlab.org
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The Drug Companies' Big Hoax

(WQ) In Biblical English "sorcery" means the practice of concocting pharmaceutical "poisons," such as recent vaccinations and painkillers, from the Greek pharmakos and pharmakeia. It is interesting that while the USA makes up only 5 percent of the world's population, it constitutes 66 percent of the psychiatric drugs prescribed on the planet.

• phármakos – properly, a sorcerer; used of people using drugs and "religious incantations" to drug people into living by their illusions (strongsnumbers.com)

Drug Companies May be Perpetuating an Enormous Hoax

Are most psychiatric drugs nothing more than [poisonous] placebos? If that's the case, then drug companies are making massive amounts of money selling patients what is actually nothing at all. We suspect that the swine flu "epidemic" was -- in large part -- a "hoax" perpetrated by drug companies. But psychiatric illnesses are real, despite the fact that some of them such as ADHD may be over diagnosed. More

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"Mind-reading" experiment highlights brain

"Mind-reading" experiment highlights how brain records emories

(ScienceDaily) It may be possible to "read" a person's memories just by looking at brain activity, according to research carried out by Wellcome Trust scientists.

In a study published in the journal Current Biology they show that our memories are recorded in regular patterns, a finding that challenges current scientific thinking.

Demis Hassabis and Professor Eleanor Maguire at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) have previously studied the role of a small area of the brain known as the hippocampus, which is crucial for navigation, memory recall, and imagining future events.

Now the researchers have shown how the hippocampus records memory.

When we move around, nerve cells (neurons) known as "place cells" located in the hippocampus, activate to tell us where we are.

Hassabis, Maguire, and colleagues used a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner, which measures changes in blood flow within the brain, to examine the activity of these places cells as a volunteer navigated around a virtual reality environment. The data were then analyzed by a computer algorithm developed by Demis Hassabis.

"We asked whether we could see any interesting patterns in the neural activity that could tell us what the participants were thinking, or in this case where they were," explains Professor Maguire, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow.

"Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality environment. In other words, we could 'read' their spatial memories." More

VIDEO: Brain scans of the future

Psychologists have found that thought patterns used to recall the past and imagine the future are strikingly similar. Using functional magnetic...

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Mind and Brain

• Memory
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Strange Science (Reference)

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