Nishimoto Hacks the Human Brain

Have you ever wondered what someone else was thinking? Sure you have, and so has everyone else on this planet. We all wonder daily, what the people around us think, of us, or even what they might think about the little bluebird chirping at their window, or the noisy train that races by. Well soon that just may be a possibility. Genius' at the University of California, Berkeley have wondered the same thing and are improving their success at doing so every day.

These UC Berkeley researchers have pulled images from inside a persons brain using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) along with computational models. Currently this type of “brain hacking” can reconstruct images from videos already watched but could be furthered to show things no one but the person sees, like a forgotten dream you had the night before.

Shinji Nishimoto, Lead author and subject for the study, Said “Our Natural Visual experience is like watching a movie. In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.” For this experiment he had to remain inside an MRI scanner for hours at a time while

​​they observed blood flow to the brain. Jack Gallant, Neuroscientist and coauthor of this study, writes “This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”​

During the experiment the subjects were made to watch two different sets of Hollywood trailers and a MRI was used to calculate blood flow through the part of the brain that takes care of visual information and interpretation (visual cortex). On the PC, the brain was divided into tiny parts for the brain hacking study.

Nishimoto said, “We addressed this problem by developing a two-stage model that separately describes the underlying neural population and blood flow signals. We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions. For that, we need to first understand how the brain works while we are watching movies.”

When we get this down, and get this all figured out it will have unlimited uses, it could be used to communicate when one or both are unable to do so, like a heart attack, coma and seizure patients, and so on. It could even be used to cure neurodegenerative diseases or advance your brain to new levels.