Thursday, March 6, 2008

Brain Scanner Can Tell What You're Looking At. (Wired.com)

I was browsing over my startpage at netvibe and found this very interesting news over at wired.com

Technically, this is not a new thing since MRI (magnetic resonance imagery) and other brain imaging techniques have been available for quite awhile now, but I guess it's some sort of breakthrough because now, through this promising technology, doctors can now see how our brains work in real-time.
Though, I'm more interested in the dream-capturing capability of this new technology.
I need to figure out why teens "wet dream". I was really puzzled before because I was dreaming of people (i guess they were models) whom I don't remember seeing in person or in mags or television.

A computer will soon be able to do it, simply by analyzing the activity of your brain.

That's the promise of a decoding system unveiled this week in Nature by neuroscientists from the University of California at Berkeley.

The scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine -- a real-time brain scanner -- to record the mental activity of a person looking at thousands of random pictures: people, animals, landscapes, objects, the stuff of everyday visual life. With those recordings the researchers built a computational model for predicting the mental patterns elicited by looking at any other photograph. When tested with neurological readouts generated by a different set of pictures, the decoder passed with flying colors, identifying the images seen with unprecedented accuracy.

You can read the full article here


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