Looking into the mind of another human being has traditionally been the province of clairvoyants and quacks, but new research at the University of California, Berkeley, is bringing it closer and closer to reality. In an experiment run by Professor Jack Gallant a computer was able to reproduce images from test subjects’ visual processing system on a screen.

The test subjects were made to watch hours of Hollywood movie trailers as their brains were analyzed using an fMRI machine. A computer program was designed to learn how each person’s visual system responded to the images. As with similar brain-analyzing technologies, the fMRI machine and computer program must be calibrated to each individuals’ unique brain wave pattern. However, once the process is calibrated correctly, it is able to reproduce specific scenes from the trailers.

Currently, the research is in its infant stages, and the images recorded from the brain are vague and difficult to interpret. The program was only able to do so correctly by comparing the brain images with the library of video trailers that the subjects had watched. Until recently, using fMRI machinery to pull images out of the brain was only able to do so for stationary images, due to the relatively slow flow of blood in the brain that fMRI machines are designed to detect. This research, however, uses a statistical approach to determine what images are being relayed from the brain to the machine, allowing the program to fill in the gaps and create an actual video.

This work has been ongoing for decades, and is only going to increase in importance and relevance as the technology improves. Professor Gallant himself had this to say: “Everyone has been very positive about the work, though within the field this particular paper is viewed correctly as a natural evolutionary step in computational modeling, rather than a revolutionary step that appears to have emerged de novo” [source]. Nothing too revolutionary has occurred, this is just the next step on our way to understanding the brain.

Watching your own and others’ dreams on TV is only one potential outcome for this project. In reality, the research performed by Professor Gallant and others like him is opening up all kinds of new doors to the functioning of our minds. In this particular study, researchers were successful because we know more about the visual processing system of the brain than we do about most other areas. As our understanding of these areas increases, we will be able to use similar techniques to decode people’s emotions, dreams, and thoughts. Dr. Gallant’s research itself has three goals: repair/rehabilitation of damaged visual systems, provide tools for neurological diagnosis, and to build brain-machine interfaces for neural prosthetics. This provides hope for people with all kinds of visual and neurological ailments. However, it also implies that within the foreseeable future, instead of trying to explain a dream we just had upon waking to someone else, we can simply say “here, let me just show you.”