Researchers now able to copy images in your brain to a computer

Viewing the brain while it does it's "thing" has become a fairly well understood science today. So much so that doctors and their ilk are able to "see" metal illness and disease. But "seeing" what the brain sees or imagines is a bit of a misnomer. Or has been up to this point. It would appear now that Japanese scientists have a device that can quite literally take images out of your brain and recreate them on a computer screen.

From IO9:

• Using an fMRI brain scanner, researchers read electrical signals coming from people's brains while they thought about letters in the word "neuron." The research team led by Yukiyaso Kamitani at ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs has designed software that can process the output of the fMRI and search for signals associated with vision.

A strange twist on this process is that the team is not only able to extract images of what a subject has or is looking at, but images of the test items when the subject is not viewing them. This opens the door to viewing imaginary images or "dreams" at some point in the future.

<- Neuron via IO9 ->
<- Pink Tentacle article ->