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Japanese Scientists Claim To Reconstruct Images From Brain Data
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Dec 11, 2008 02:03 PM
from the shutter-to-think dept.
from the shutter-to-think dept.
conner_bw writes "In a world first, a research group in Kyoto Japan has succeeded in processing and displaying optically received images directly from the human brain. Here's the Japanese press release for good measure. One step closer to broadcasting your dreams? The research is due to be published today in the US scientific journal Neuron."
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Device Reads Messages From Surface of the Brain 156 comments
Al writes "Technology Review has a story about a start-up company that has developed a more-accurate and less-invasive way to read a patient's thoughts. Neurolutions, based in St Louis, has developed a small implanted device that translates signals recorded from the surface of the brain into computer commands. The device, which is less invasive than implants and more accurate than scalp electrodes, uses a grid of electrodes placed directly on the surface of the brain to monitor electrical activity. This technology is currently used to find the origin of seizures in patients with uncontrolled epilepsy before surgery. But the company says it could also help paralyzed patients control a computer and perhaps prosthetic limbs using their thoughts. Tests involving more than 20 patients have shown that people can quickly learn to move a cursor on a computer screen using their brain activity."
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Predictably (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
You mean "The subject was an underpaid, overworked grad student/postdoc, and the image was 'NEURON' in a blatant example of pandering to a specific high-impact journal to increase the likelyhood of acceptance."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dreaming Is A Private Thing (Score:3, Interesting)
And once again Isaac Asimov predicted this [wikipedia.org].
Re:Dreaming Is A Private Thing (Score:4, Insightful)
No he did not.
He wrote a story about something like this. People ahve thought about doing this for years.
There is a difference in predicting something, and writing a story.
He also wrote about a bunch of stuff that never happens, and won't likely happen.
I like the mans work, but come on if he gets put any higher on a pedestal he'll be able to touch the moon.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe that's how we'll get a space elevator?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm still waiting for Sally [wikipedia.org]; that story was set in the year 2120. I'm still waiting for R. Daneel as well.
As to writing about stuff that never happened, THIS never happened - until now. The "hyperdrive" (what Roddenberry renamed "warp drive") was never invented - yet. Roddenberry and his writers were prescient, too. I remember a world without cell phones, flat screen talking computers, self-opening doors, and space shuttles (I remember a world without space travel at all).
I merely mention Asimov because I t
Re:Dreaming Is A Private Thing (Score:5, Funny)
As to writing about stuff that never happened, THIS never happened - until now. The "hyperdrive" (what Roddenberry renamed "warp drive") was never invented - yet. Roddenberry and his writers were prescient, too. I remember a world without cell phones, flat screen talking computers, self-opening doors, and space shuttles (I remember a world without space travel at all).
Wow. Your UID should have a minus sign in front of it.
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Re:Dreaming Is A Private Thing (Score:4, Informative)
I looked it up on wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and found that A Logic Named Joe [baen.com] is posted on the internet, with a link from wikipedia.
It appears that Leinster beat Asimov to the punch; it's possible, being a science fiction fan before he was a science fiction writer, that Asimov even read "Joe". Wikipedia puts "Joe" at 1946, but Multivac in 1955 [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Dreaming Is A Private Thing (Score:4, Funny)
He can probably already touch the moon. Don't you know your Vonegut?
Isaac's in heaven now.
I assume that Asimov got to tag the moon on his way by. Best speech opening ever.
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Re:Dreaming Is A Private Thing (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry - If you don't recognize the quote and have no context, it's not funny at all.
Vonnegut [wikipedia.org] (misspelled in my post above) became honorary president of the American Humanist Association [wikipedia.org] after Isaac Asimov [wikipedia.org], their former president, passed on. As such, he had the somewhat awkward honor of addressing the Association at their first meeting after losing their president and had to come up with some way to say goodbye to Isaac and start his speech. (If you're unfamiliar with Humanism [wikipedia.org], it's an entirely human-based religion/philosophy. Its members are largely atheist or agnostic and practice strict scientific skepticism while shunning religious superstitions or unsupported beliefs - Heaven/Hell included. The idea that Asimov, as president of the AHA, would have any literal belief in Heaven would be ludicrous.)
According to Vonnegut, opening his speech with
Isaac's in heaven now.
not only did a great job of breaking the ice in a very awkward situation, but set the entire ball-room laughing out loud.
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Quick.. (Score:2, Funny)
No more lack of artistic skills for me (Score:5, Interesting)
I have lots of cool images in my head for comics and wallpaper, however I lack the artistic talent to bring those images from my mind to paper/photoshop. Maybe soon I will be able to compensate for my lack of artistic ability.
Re:No more lack of artistic skills for me (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:No more lack of artistic skills for me (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a memory from my childhood that I can almost recall at will, at almost any time. When I was 6, my father took me on a week long canoeing trip. I remember standing on a road, looking through some trees down to the river onto some cool rapids which we were about to go down. I can see in my mind what seems to be a perfect picture: the side of the road, the wooded slope covered with dry leaves, trees, and the river. It seems that I could just sit down a draw the scene from my memory. The funny thing is, every time I try to focus on some detail, for example when try to identify the trees, or look at a number on a mile-post next to the road, or something like that, the whole picture completely disappears, and I have hard time recalling it again. The details are simply not there at all.
Now if I were to draw the scene, I would undoubtedly substitute some sort of simplified shapes, or maybe just a pattern of shades of green, for the leaves. But you could look at the details of the drawing and see how it was done. You probably would be unable to identify the trees by their leaves, the drawing would not contain that much details, but you would be able to see the way the image is rendered on paper. I cannot do that with the mental image. I believe that in my mind I am able to render the overall image without actually rendering the details at all, not even as some sort of impressionist jumble of colors and shades. If that's the case, transferring this image onto paper would require filling in all the details in some way, which, IMHO, is exactly the hard part of drawing or painting.
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Emacs Macro! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
a research group in Kyoto Prefecture has succeeded in processing and displaying optically received images directly from the human brain.
Images you acquire optically follow a very different path from dreams or "mind pictures". The former aren't really detailled pictures, they are visual concepts that cannot be cast into a bitmap without interpretation. If we were to talk about the last dream you have made of a human, I could convince you that their hairs were of one or either color using suggestion techniques.
Kinda neat, not that exciting though (Score:4, Interesting)
The visual cortex is one of the more understood areas of the brain, and decoding V1/V2 is low-hanging fruit. To the extent that memory and dreams back-project to these areas, perhaps recording parts of these experiences would be possible.
Making this practical and inexpensive would be quite a practical breakthrough though - imagine being able to imagine something and import it into GIMP from a headband. Doing this through MRI would be impractical unless someone would be able to keep the image stable in their head for long enough for a high resolution scan of the area (and bear the ~$700/hour cost of MRI).
Re:Kinda neat, not that exciting though (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we "keep images in our heads" at all? When I try to, it is more of a feeling than an image, and it's a fragmentary one at that. Wouldn't it make sense if our imagination worked a lot like our vision, i.e. we can only focus on small bits of the visual field at once, and so would only be able to imagine those pieces and attributes of an image pertinent to our needs or wants?
I'm free-balling here, mind. I can't seem to put coherent, complete images in my head, but others very well might.
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Re:Kinda neat, not that exciting though (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Having a device like this, you might be able to learn how to hold an image in your head. If it could give you instant feedback, perhaps you can learn it like any other skill.
So the existence of the device, over time, could change the answer to your question.
Re:Kinda neat, not that exciting though (Score:5, Funny)
And imagine spending the next week try to figure out GIMP to be able to do anything with it~
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Re:Kinda neat, not that exciting though (Score:4, Informative)
[i]The visual cortex is one of the more understood areas of the brain, and decoding V1/V2 is low-hanging fruit.[/i]
Low-hanging fruit? I agree, it's fairly well understood, but given the pre-processing that happens in the retinal ganglion cells, and the kind of data that actually ends up getting to V1 (after being relayed from the LGN), I'm surprised an actual image can be reconstructed from the information. After all, the RGCs tend to pass on things like movement, edges, contrast and color, but it's not even remotely pixel by pixel type data, which is precisely the informaiton that gets passed on to V1.
Since it's coming from an fMRI, there's no way the image can be very detailed. I suspect it will be very low resolution.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The images they used were very high contrast (black and white) and quite simple - squares, lines, crosses, etc. It's not really surprising you can reconstruct that sort of data from the visual cortex. Still, very cool. The paper is worth a look.
I'll be really impressed when someone reconstructs a recognizable non-synthetic image. Oh, and how colour is represented.
Does it get lonely up in your crystal tower? (Score:5, Insightful)
"The current accomplishment is low hanging fruit and therefore uninteresting. Surprising, really, that they found funding for such an unnecessary demonstration at all! By commercializing this technology, it would become sufficiently interesting to deserve my royal approval."
Belittling humanity's incremental advancement as if you're a third party, how's that working out for you?
I think it's tremendously exciting. Thanks for the buzzkill though, it reminds me to get off the computer and interact with people of my choosing.
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No pictures? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this is the first time I can scientifically say, "Pics or it didn't happen."
For the last time... (Score:5, Informative)
People read blurby summaries, which don't include the results, the full reasoning, methods, etc, and then act as if it's the fault of the researchers. It's absurd, that's neither the paper nor the direct work of the researchers, it's some non-scientist working for a news source. Read the actual paper, TFA in these cases are rarely any better than TFS.
http://download.cell.com/neuron/pdf/PIIS0896627308009586.pdf [cell.com]
There's the PDF. It does have the very pixelated images. I haven't had time to read through it.
As always, don't complain to me if you don't happen to have a subscription, and not having a subscription is no reason to act as if the results aren't real.
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Re:No pictures? (Score:5, Informative)
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Pixels (Score:2, Funny)
In the recent experiment, the research group asked two people to look at 440 different still images one by one on a 100-pixel screen. Each of the images comprised random gray sections and flashing sections.
100 pixels? Sounds like they were watching japanese porn...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Random gray sections and flashing sections? Definitely Japanese porn.
This is NOT new (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, it is (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't read the full article, but from the abstract
The article you linked to seems to only be able to tell which object a person saw from their fMRI. I believe it required established measurements too, IE "this part of the brain lights up when they see a face. In blind studies, that part of the brain lit up, so they must have seen a face."
Whether it required a calibration for each individual or not, no image reconstruction was done: it's not the same thing at all.
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World first? I think not! (Score:5, Funny)
THEY have been able to do this for decades! Where is your tinfoil hat now? Ha!
Beginning of the end for me (Score:2, Redundant)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
In all likely, you will find out your not nearly the perv you though you are.
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Either way you're right, considering the thoughts I have, I definitely don't want to see what everyone else is thinking about.
This is so cool! (Score:3, Interesting)
This , if true , will have HUGE implications - we'll be able to see what people THINK. I don't know if you actually grasp the monument dimensions of this. Checking for terrorism, knowing if you are really loved, truth telling machines, like the internet, something like this can level the plain field for a long long time...
Re:This is so cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
This , if true , will have HUGE implications - we'll be able to see what people THINK.
Data in V1/V2 does not constitute cognition, those areas constitute pretty much a visual map of data gathered by the eye (roughly). Its doubtful that imagined visuals are even represented in these areas. This, in other words, doesn't provide any insight into thoughts, just what people see.
I admit, though, that this is awesome. If we can read it, we theoretically could write to it, which would allow for direct neural interfaces.
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I still wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Not impressed (Score:5, Funny)
Dr. Walter Bishop (Cambridge) was doing this in the '70s.
Feedback Loop? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Feedback Loop? (Score:4, Funny)
Would looking at the image your brain is generating at the same time you are generating it create a feedback loop much like holding a microphone too close to a speaker?
Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich?
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Nope, dreams would just be noise (Score:5, Informative)
Dreams appear to be based on the 'noise' coming in, but a lot of interpretation is applied (and without imposed constraints of consistency or logic). A common game/prank [ultimatecampresource.com] involves people asking yes/no questions about an alleged dream, but the answers they get are based on some simple scheme like "yes if the last word in the question they ask ends in a consonant". Surprisingly detailed 'stories' get constructed... by the person asking the questions. (Here's what appears to be an online version [callenish.com].) Actual dreams seem to be built in an analogous way, with the subconscious 'asking questions' of the senses (which are just feeding in 'static') and weaving an experience out of them.
I'd guess that 'eavesdropping' on dreams via this means would only get the kind of swirling colors and such you 'see' when you close your eyes.
TLJ (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet Another Unnew Result (Score:5, Informative)
The primary visual cortex (V1) has already been shown to be retinotopic. What's being seen can be mapped directly from the cortex. It's crude and low-res, but it works.
20 years ago a researcher working with Karl Pribram at Radford University was able to detect signals from small cellular assemblies of the visual cortex that represented a particular shape being viewed without mapping the entire shape from V1.
In both these, the images were received directly from the brain. In both they were digitally processed and presented. In all three what was retrieved was not an image, but was a pattern of neural electrical activity that they had already determined represented a particular visual field. They could not (in keeping with the /. tendency to represent reality with fiction) for instance, retrieve the third frame of a series of images that had been briefly presesnted. They would have had to show the image for some time that record EEG from the appropriate areas for long enough that they could get a good correlation when showing it a second time.
Some great potential here (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, I'm reminded of the interrogation device from the movie Barb Wire, the one that pulls out images from your brain whether you want it to or not...
Law Enforcement Sketch Drawing (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this would be amazing for law enforcement sketches. Instead of having to ask a witness what the person looked like, they could just copy it out of their visual cortex. No, it wouldn't be perfect, and it wouldn't be acceptable in court as proof someone was there (since you can just imagine your worst enemy in the place of the actual person), but it would help with sketches for wanted posters and the like. Especially if it was cheap and easy.
The Opposite (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if the process can be reversed, and images can be fed into the brain to create a dream sequence? Will people who really hate their reality use this as an escape and never try to wake up again?
Cool story!
Brainshots? (Score:3, Funny)
I haven't read the article yet. Does it include any brainshots? (Please, no JFK jokes...)
Re:Pics or it didn't happen (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe this image will not require a subscription, although I suspect it will.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/cache/MiamiImageURL/B6WSS-4V4113M-P-7/0?wchp=dGLbVtz-zSkzk [sciencedirect.com]
On the off chance it does, keep in mind this is not the full article. Critiques along the lines of "this doesn't prove anything," or "They should have done X" are premature if you haven't read the full (journal) article. If you thought of it, they probably covered that in the article you're not willing to pay for.
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