One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby justdrew » Fri Apr 05, 2013 4:25 am

welp, once again...

It's Yesterday's Future... Today!

Scientists Decode Dreams With Brain Scans
By Greg Miller | 04.04.13

It used to be that what happened in your dreams was your own little secret. But today scientists report for the first time that they’ve successfully decoded details of people’s dreams using brain scans.

Before you reach for your tin hat, you should know that the scientists managed this feat only with the full cooperation of their research subjects, and they only decoded dreams after the fact, not in real time. The thought police won’t be busting you for renting bowling shoes from Saddam Hussein or whatever else you’ve been up to in your dreams.

All the same, the work is yet another impressive step for researchers interested in decoding mental states from brain activity, and it opens the door to a new way of studying dreaming, one of the most mysterious and fascinating aspects of the human experience.

In the first part of the new study, neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani and colleagues at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan monitored three young men as they tried to get some sleep inside an fMRI scanner while the machine monitored their brain activity. The researchers also monitored each volunteer’s brain activity with EEG electrodes, and when they saw an EEG signature indicative of dreaming, they woke him up to ask what he’d been dreaming about.

Technically speaking, this is what researchers call ”hypnagogic imagery,” the dream-like state that occurs as people fall asleep. In the interest of saving time, Kamitani and colleagues chose to study this type of imagery rather than the dreams that tend to occur during REM sleep later in the night. They woke up each subject at least 200 times over the course of several days to build up a database of dream reports.

In the second part of the experiment, Kamitani and colleagues developed a visual imagery decoder based on machine learning algorithms. They trained the decoder to classify patterns of brain activity recorded from the same three men while they were awake and watching a video montage of hundreds of images selected from several online databases. After the decoder for each person had been trained, the researchers could input a pattern of brain activity and have the decoder predict which image was most likely to have produced that pattern of brain activity.

But that much has been done before. Where Kamitani’s team went beyond previous work was in feeding the decoder patterns of brain activity collected while the subjects were dreaming. This enabled them to correctly identify objects the men had seen in their dreams, they report Apr. 4 in Science. Or rather, they could identify the type of object a subject had seen: it could predict that a man had dreamt about a car, not that he’d been cruising around in a Maserati. And the decoder only worked when the researchers gave it a pair of possible objects to chose from (whether it was a man or a chair, for example).

“Our dream decoding is still very primitive,” Kamitani said.

Decoding color, action, or emotion is also still beyond the scope of the technology, Kamitani says. Also, it only seems to work for imagery that occurred — at most — about 15 seconds before waking up.

Finally, the decoder is unique to each person. To decode the dreams of another person, the team would have to train up a new decoder by having that person view hundreds of images.

Even so, it’s remarkable that it works as well as it does, says neuroscientist Jack Gallant of the University of California, Berkeley and a pioneer of decoding mental states from brain scans. ”It took just a huge amount of non-glamorous work to do this, and they deserve big props for that,” Gallant said.

With refinements, Gallant says the method could be useful for studying the nature and function of dreams.

“There’s the classic question of when you dream are you actively generating these movies in your head, or is it that when you wake up you’re essentially confabulating it,” Gallant said. “What this shows you is there’s at least some correspondence between what the brain is doing during dreaming and what it’s doing when you’re awake.”

Kamitani is thinking about the possibilities too. ”One theory states that dreaming is for strengthening memory, but another theory states dreaming is for forgetting,” he said. “We could record the frequency of decoded dream contents for each memory item and see the correlation between the frequency and the memory performance.”


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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby elfismiles » Fri Mar 28, 2014 2:41 pm

We know what you’re thinking: Scientists find a way to read minds
By Maxim Lott / Published March 28, 2014 / FoxNews.com
Image

Think mind reading is science fiction?

Think again.

Scientists have used brain scanners to detect and reconstruct the faces that people are thinking of, according to a a study accepted for publication this month in the journal NeuroImage.

In the study, scientists hooked participants up to an fMRI brain scanner – which determines activity in different parts of the brain by measuring blood flow – and showed them images of faces. Then, using only the brain scans, the scientists were able to create images of the faces the people were looking at.

“It is mind reading,” said Alan S. Cowen, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley who co-authored the study with professor Marvin M. Chun from Yale and Brice A. Kuhl from New York University.

Image

'You can even imagine, way down the road, a witness to a crime might want to come in and reconstruct a suspect’s face.'

- Alan S. Cowen, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley

The study says it is the first to try to reconstruct faces from thoughts. The photos above are the actual photos and reconstructions done in the lab.

Image

While the reconstructions based on 30 brain readings are blurry, they approximate the true images. They got the skin color right in all of them, and 24 out of 30 reconstructions correctly detected the presence or absence of a smile.

The brain readings were worse at determining gender and hair color: About two-thirds of the reconstructions clearly detected the gender, and only half got hair color correct.

“There’s definitely room for improvement,” Cowen said, adding that these experiments were conducted two years ago, though they only recently were accepted for publication. He said he and others have been working on improving the process in the interim.

“I’m applying more sophisticated mathematical models [to the brain scan results], so the results should get better,” he said.

Image

To tease out faces based on brain activity, the scientists showed participants in the study 300 faces while recording their brain activity. Then they showed the participants 30 new faces and used their previously recorded patterns to create 30 images based only on their brain scans.

Once the technology improves, Cowen said, applications could range from better understanding mental disorders, to recording dreams, to solving crimes.

“You can see how people perceive faces depending on different disorders, like autism – and use that to help diagnose therapies,” he said.

That’s because the reconstructions are based not on the actual image, but on how the image is perceived by a subject’s brain. If an autistic person sees a face differently, the difference will show up in the brain scan reconstruction.

Images from dreams are also detectable.

“And you can even imagine,” Cowen said, “way down the road, a witness to a crime might want to come in and reconstruct a suspect’s face.”

How soon could that happen?

“It really depends on advances in brain imaging technology, more so than the mathematical analysis. It could be 10, 20 years away.”

One challenge is that different brains show different activity for the same image. The blurry images pictured here are actually averages of the thoughts of six lab volunteers. If one were to look at any individual’s reading, the image would be less consistent.

“There’s a wide variation in how people’s brains work under a scanner – some people have better brains for fMRI – and so if you were to pick a participant at random it might be that their reconstructions are really good, or it might be that their reconstructions are really poor, which is why we averaged across all the participants,” Cowen said.

For now, he added, you shouldn’t worry about others snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting information.

“This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain. So you couldn’t read passive memories – you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it,” Cowen said.

“It’s a matter of time, and eventually – maybe 200 years from now – we’ll have some way of reading inactive parts of the brain. But that’s a much harder problem, as it involves measuring very fine details of brain structure that we don’t even really understand.”

The author of this piece, Maxim Lott, can be reached on twitter at @maximlott or at maxim.lott@foxnews.com


http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/03/ ... ead-minds/
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby brainpanhandler » Fri Mar 28, 2014 3:39 pm

Images from dreams are also detectable.


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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby BrandonD » Fri Mar 28, 2014 10:55 pm

elfismiles » Fri Mar 28, 2014 1:41 pm wrote:
We know what you’re thinking: Scientists find a way to read minds
By Maxim Lott / Published March 28, 2014 / FoxNews.com
Image

Think mind reading is science fiction?

Think again.

Scientists have used brain scanners to detect and reconstruct the faces that people are thinking of, according to a a study accepted for publication this month in the journal NeuroImage.

In the study, scientists hooked participants up to an fMRI brain scanner – which determines activity in different parts of the brain by measuring blood flow – and showed them images of faces. Then, using only the brain scans, the scientists were able to create images of the faces the people were looking at.

“It is mind reading,” said Alan S. Cowen, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley who co-authored the study with professor Marvin M. Chun from Yale and Brice A. Kuhl from New York University.

Image

'You can even imagine, way down the road, a witness to a crime might want to come in and reconstruct a suspect’s face.'

- Alan S. Cowen, a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley

The study says it is the first to try to reconstruct faces from thoughts. The photos above are the actual photos and reconstructions done in the lab.

Image

While the reconstructions based on 30 brain readings are blurry, they approximate the true images. They got the skin color right in all of them, and 24 out of 30 reconstructions correctly detected the presence or absence of a smile.

The brain readings were worse at determining gender and hair color: About two-thirds of the reconstructions clearly detected the gender, and only half got hair color correct.

“There’s definitely room for improvement,” Cowen said, adding that these experiments were conducted two years ago, though they only recently were accepted for publication. He said he and others have been working on improving the process in the interim.

“I’m applying more sophisticated mathematical models [to the brain scan results], so the results should get better,” he said.

Image

To tease out faces based on brain activity, the scientists showed participants in the study 300 faces while recording their brain activity. Then they showed the participants 30 new faces and used their previously recorded patterns to create 30 images based only on their brain scans.

Once the technology improves, Cowen said, applications could range from better understanding mental disorders, to recording dreams, to solving crimes.

“You can see how people perceive faces depending on different disorders, like autism – and use that to help diagnose therapies,” he said.

That’s because the reconstructions are based not on the actual image, but on how the image is perceived by a subject’s brain. If an autistic person sees a face differently, the difference will show up in the brain scan reconstruction.

Images from dreams are also detectable.

“And you can even imagine,” Cowen said, “way down the road, a witness to a crime might want to come in and reconstruct a suspect’s face.”

How soon could that happen?

“It really depends on advances in brain imaging technology, more so than the mathematical analysis. It could be 10, 20 years away.”

One challenge is that different brains show different activity for the same image. The blurry images pictured here are actually averages of the thoughts of six lab volunteers. If one were to look at any individual’s reading, the image would be less consistent.

“There’s a wide variation in how people’s brains work under a scanner – some people have better brains for fMRI – and so if you were to pick a participant at random it might be that their reconstructions are really good, or it might be that their reconstructions are really poor, which is why we averaged across all the participants,” Cowen said.

For now, he added, you shouldn’t worry about others snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting information.

“This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain. So you couldn’t read passive memories – you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it,” Cowen said.

“It’s a matter of time, and eventually – maybe 200 years from now – we’ll have some way of reading inactive parts of the brain. But that’s a much harder problem, as it involves measuring very fine details of brain structure that we don’t even really understand.”

The author of this piece, Maxim Lott, can be reached on twitter at @maximlott or at maxim.lott@foxnews.com


http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/03/ ... ead-minds/


They are leaving quite a bit out of the reconstruction process, which leads me to suspect that this is not quite as miraculous as it is being promoted.

My guess is that the machine is simply creating a composite face from a bank of thousands of faces, rather than starting with zero information and drawing a face from scratch.

My guess is that each face in the bank is probably associated with very specific electrical activity in certain areas of the brain, and each time that part is activated, that particular face is brought a little bit more into prominence. Thus the weird "composite" image in every instance. This would explain why, even though it is not accurate enough to identify specific features, it is still somehow accurate enough to draw little details such as the white dot "reflection" in the eyeball.

I could be wrong though, I really wish they would go into a bit more detail about the actual mechanics of the reconstruction process. Is actual "drawing" taking place, or is it a bank of photos as I suspect?
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby elfismiles » Thu Jun 30, 2016 9:45 am

This new device can visualize your thoughts (sort of)
By Karen Turner June 29 at 11:20 AM

(Courtesy of the Journal of Neuroscience)

The idea of a device that can materialize one’s memories out of thin air seems like it could only exist in science fiction. But in a new study, researchers were able to pretty accurately sketch out the thoughts of participants simply by scanning their brains. It’s helping scientists understand how memory works in the human brain, and it may be a first step toward the futuristic ability to read minds.

Researchers at the University of Oregon showed a group of participants, all strapped into an MRI machine, a series of photos of human faces. They followed the participants’ brain activity as they looked at each image, mapping neural activity to a code of numbers that correspond to the characteristics of each face. This part of the experiment accounted for the machine-learning function, measuring how the brain registers the numbers assigned with each new face.

Combined activation activity across all participants in the study. The image on the left represents the brain visually processing each image while the brain on the right is the memory attempting to recreate the image. (Courtesy of the Journal of Neuroscience)

Then, each participant, still in the MRI machine, was shown a picture of a new face. Using what they had observed, researchers programmed a computer to reconstruct the face based on the neural activity of each participant. The result? The computer sketch bore a good resemblance to the new image seen by the participant. Researchers determined the computer’s accuracy by showing the original image and the computer sketch to a new group of participants and asking them to compare the images, answering questions like, “Is the face male or female?” or “Is the face’s skin light or dark?” Participants’ answers were by and large the same for the two images. The computer’s new sketch reflected the face processed in the earlier participant’s brain.

Image
The OTC — occipitotemporal cortex, which handles visual inputs — set of images represents the machine’s output when the participant was actively observing the picture. The ANG — angular gyrus part of the brain, which processes memory retrieval — set shows the memory-reconstructed version. The five images on the left are the most accurate recreations, while the two on the right are the least accurate. (Courtesy of the Journal of Neuroscience)

Participants were then shown two images of faces at once and told to pick one to picture in their minds. The images were removed, and the computer program crawled their brain activity, attempting to re-create the face in their memory. The resulting sketches were less accurate than the first experiment, but researchers measured the pixel value of the re-creation versus the original and found it to be accurate 54 percent of the time.

“It works better than chance, but just by a little bit,” said Brice Kuhl, one of the researchers. “Our study provides a proof of concept that patterns of brain activity can be translated into visualizations of specific faces, but the accuracy of our method is not high enough that we can have confidence in any particular visualization.”

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Researchers Kuhl and Hongmi Lee said the study revealed compelling information about how the brain processes memory.

“We know this brain region ‘lights up’ when people remember something, but there has been a lot of debate about why it lights up,” Kuhl said. “Our major finding was that patterns of activity within this brain region carry information about what people are remembering.”

A deeper understanding of the brain’s relationship to memory could be helpful to studying Alzheimer’s or other memory disorders down the road.

But what about the mind-reading aspect, the idea that this machine drew images from people’s memories? Kuhl and Lee are hesitant to call their experiment true mind reading.

“Certainly, we think it is exciting to see things in science now that used to be only in science fiction,” Kuhl said. “But we will leave it to others to dream up ways in which these methods can be used for other purposes.”


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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby Karmamatterz » Thu Jun 30, 2016 11:20 am

Reminds me of Heretics of Dune and the brain scanner used on Miles Teg.

No doubt this tech will be perfected. Perhaps an outcome will be that we need be control of our thoughts so PTB can't as easily read them through tech. This stuff may seem sci-fi to some but it is real and really creepy.
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby elfismiles » Tue Mar 06, 2018 10:15 am

Daily news / 5 March 2018
AI reconstructs whatever you see just by reading a brain scan

Image
The top row contains the original images, followed by reconstructions from three different people

Guohua Shen et al

By Leah Crane

AI can pluck images directly from a person’s brain. Given an fMRI scan of someone looking at a picture, an algorithm can reconstruct the original picture from the scan. Though the results aren’t yet perfect, they are still often recognisable and hint at what may be possible in the future.

Guohua Shen at Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute and his colleagues experimented with three types of images: “natural” pictures of things like bats, snowmobiles and stained …

PAY WALL
https://www.newscientist.com/article/21 ... rain-scan/
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby elfismiles » Wed Nov 06, 2019 1:28 pm

Neural network reconstructs human thoughts from brain waves in real time
by Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology / October 30, 2019
Image
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-10-neu ... ughts.html


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf-P3b2AnZw
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby thrulookingglass » Wed Nov 06, 2019 1:43 pm

Well shit. I'm pretty sure the entire human race is under mind control, a malevolent form of it too. It's my firm belief that some military agency perfected computer based "intelligence" in secrecy. If the brain is just electrical signals, they can be read remotely as well as controlled remotely. Maybe we are truly just a slave race, much like the replicants of 'Blade Runner' built to do the dirty work of occulted kings. This is the scariest thing I've ever seen.
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