TEDx Talks
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2019–2022
17:27 · 175K views · Oct 31, 2017
Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant shows how fMRI brain mapping can be used to decode what a person sees, with visualizations of brain activity and its implications.
HN cites it in discussions of reconstructing images from brain scans and the ethics of future brain reading.
4 comments from Hacker News
Tons! Jack Gallant's group at UC Berkley has done a lot of interesting fMRI decoding. The approach in their earlier papers (e.g., Kay et al, 2008 [0]) is neat because it uses some knowledge of how early visual areas represent information, rather than just flinging a decoder at it. They later extended this to movies (Nishimoto et al., 2011 [1]), and have subsequently moved a bit away from sensory information to "semantic" decoding. Jack has a TED talk about this [2] and Kendrick Kay has written some News and Views/Perspective pieces [e.g., 3] that might be interesting too, as it links to other groups' work. I like their approach because it ties into neuroscience rather than just throwing ML at the wall and seeing what sticks, but there's also a huge cottage industry of "Blackbox ML" + MRI to do decoding. My sense is that this has moved slightly out of the limelight and into the stage where people incrementally improve it with newer ML techniques like GANs [4] and diffusion (this link), but it might just be me. For sleep specifically, you might be interested in Horikawa et al. (2013)[5], who could predict words associated with dream contents (e.g., "Car" but didn't try to reconstruct them). There's also a very short perspective on it [6]. [0] Kay, K., Naselaris, T., Prenger, R. et al. Identifying natural images from human brain activity. Nature 452, 352–355 (2008). [LINK] [1] Nishimoto, S., Vu, A. T., Naselaris, T., Benjamini, Y., Yu, B., & Gallant, J. L. (2011). Reconstructing
Wireless reading and intrusion of brainwaves or worse make people drones Brain mapping [1] + opsin gene delivery to brain using virus that crosses blood brain barrier [2] + advanced network tracking using phone ect to determine location of head [3] + ??sensitive networks to constantly scan a users head?? + ???networked lasers, em waves to alter thought or behavior in public??? = Telepathy and brain bullying [1] Brain mapping this video "in the future we will have very cheap and very ubiquitous brain reading systems" [2] opsin gene delivery [LINK] [3] human tracking [LINK] Imagine using media such as popular netflix shows, meme's, and other attention grabbing media to map someones brain passively and retain that data. Dope individuals with food, water, air that have virus. bam mind reading/bullying Again the science (brain science, sensors, and em netowrks) probably need to be done to do this We 10000000% need more monitoring of vectors like this. Viruses et all need to be constantly monitored for public safety. Sure we probably do it in wastewater but thats terribly imprecise and a stupid high LOD. Wonder if there are automated jigs that do this in waste water.
I feel like we are so close to wirelessly monitoring all brain waves (next 50 years) we will probably be able to, in real time, recognize and diagnose abnormal brain patterns. I think it would be promising if we get this sensor tech up and then perhaps deploy nanotech to interfere with maladaptive brain patterns. The ethics of such a device is considerably sticky. TED talk by Jack Gallant this video recreating vision: [LINK] another ted talk by John-Dylan Haynes [LINK] paraphrased: "wireless non-contact mind reading tech may be cheap and mass producible within the next 50 years." the only rate limiting step with his method of decoding thoughts is that it takes time under a high energy device to pair associations in the brain. Think of how much screen time we currently use. If we could pair a wireless 'headset' like headphones while looking at pictures on a screen it would be possible to build a brain bank of children->tenenagers. Currently we just need a lot of processing power and reserved bandwidth on the internet to do some cool stuff.
Awesome awesome awesome! Medical advancements here will be fantastic. We perhaps need to be preocupied with some ethical delimmas in the near future this video