Now you can replay your Dreams too

New Technology

Written by Team Josh

Friday, 07 March 2008

Media Desk

Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time

Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time, and perhaps even provide access to the visual content of phenomena such as dreams and imagery. Is it is a reality now.

Brain imaging may make it possible to someday see what others are seeing. Such a device would make it possible to decode brain signals and track attention. The team at the University of California Berkeley said that - Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone.

For the first step, they calibrated their experiment by having two members of the team look at 1,750 photographs while being scanned by fMRI.

For the second stage, the two researchers looked at 120 new images while the fMRI machine was on. The research team then tried to figure out which photograph each one had been looking at.

They got the right answer 92 per cent of the time for one researcher and 72 per cent of the time for the second.

According to experts, the technique could also be useful for understanding the mental state of a person who is in a coma.