BRAIN-scanning technology has been used for the first time to recreate simple images by decoding the brain activity of people looking at them. Previously, the best that had been achieved was to pick which of a predetermined set of images the subject was observing.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, initially scans his subjects’ brains while they look at various images made up of a 10-by-10 array of black and white pixels. Software developed by Kamitani’s team analyses the scans to find patterns of activity that are associated with certain…
