Future Technology Trends

University of California Berkeley scientists have used a brain-scanning tool to decode and reconstruct dynamic visual experiences as people watched Hollywood movie trailers. This is a step toward mind reading capabilities. The science of neural functioning has been rapidly progressing over the last few decades. Functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI has seen many gains in the quality of the scans produced. The fMRI monitors functional changes in cerebral blood flow (rCBF). When rCBF increases, it means that neurons are firing at a greater rate. It can help researchers to understand how the brain processes visual information by examining these alterations. The functioning of the visual cortex is involved in enabling people to see. Various layers of the VC correspond to the decoding of different aspects of sight (motion etc.).  

The vid above shows the reconstructed clips. Academics have previously captured images of the cortex as a subject witnessed black and white pictures. A computational model allowed them to predict the specific photograph they were viewing with a very high accuracy rate. For the new work, they again looked at the 3-dimensional voxel changes of this region of the mind as a person was looking at a number of videos. The academics utilized movie reconstruction software that scoured 18 million seconds of YouTube data. The program can take that info and create the most likely things that were perceiving at a given time. The fMRI has a poor temporal resolution, which is one of the reasons it has been difficult to model moving objects. Previous attempts have only used static images. A new motion-energy encoding model can efficiently describe the underlying neuron population and rCBF signals.

So far, the technology is only able to recreate what a person is viewing in a rudimentary way. The refresh rate is not very good. It cannot decipher private dreams and memories. The researchers hope to use this to discover what is happening inside the heads of disabled people who cannot move. The technique may also upgrade the capacity of brain-computer-interfaces. The fMRI machines tend to be rather bulky, which could limit this application. A locked-in patient might be able to communicate with the scanning technique. Future scenarios include streaming someone’s thoughts onto a computer monitor for everyone to see.

The brain is continually taking in information from the outside world and creating something analogous to a virtual simulation. What we view as reality is actually an approximation of data that our senses collect. Hallucinations, for instance, are thoroughly convincing brain created “virtual” objects that exist without external cues. Dyregulated neurological activity in regions associated with perception can make the mind observe unreal items. Consciousness is subjective in nature and each individual views something unique. Our mind is doing more than just recognition. Neurons are constructing a full-blown virtual reality and the other people or things we interact with are representational avatars of what is located in the outside world. This is not to say that nothing really exists, merely that what we perceive is only one possible interpretation among many. The scanning techniques may allow an improved understanding of the subjectivity of consciousness. Computer generated characters can show how someone with prosopagnosia has reduced facial identification abilities, as an example. Other vision disorders may eventually be displayed as well. There is a lot of overlap in neuron activity between hallucinations, visual cues and imagination. When one type is understood, related ideas may also be unraveled as well. This will require knowledge on other regions such as the frontal or parietal cortex. Mind reading is an imprecise term and tends to make neuroscientists very skeptical about those types of claims. However, it seems like actual research is steadily encroaching into science fiction like territory.  It may still be a long time, though, before a few of these speculative outcomes become a reality.

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