One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

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Postby elfismiles » Thu Nov 05, 2009 3:23 pm

barracuda wrote:It seems like it, and while that is a fascinating advance, it might yet be some time before dream playback or forensic "witness scanning" is a reality. Cool shit, though.


Its already happening. And I'm not too happy about it.

India’s Novel Use of Brain Scans in Courts Is Debated
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/world ... .html?_r=1
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Postby Maddy » Thu Nov 05, 2009 3:52 pm

It makes me wonder if my dog sees me as another Chihuahua?




No, seriously, this is terrifying in its implications. Going from chemical lobotomies to the possibility of simply, literally, controlling people by controlling minds. Talk about Big Brother... he'd not just be watching you any more.

I don't want to live to see this. I've seen enough already.
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Postby Luther Blissett » Fri Nov 06, 2009 6:41 pm

Maddy wrote:It makes me wonder if my dog sees me as another Chihuahua?


It had long been theorized that cats see their owners as larger members of the same species…I remember my mother telling me this when I got frustrated with my cat's apathy when I was around 9 years old.

However, it seems to be generally agreed upon that dogs realize we are a separate, dominant species. Should explain a lot of differences between the dogs and cats as pets.
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Postby barracuda » Fri Nov 06, 2009 7:16 pm

Maddy wrote:I don't want to live to see this. I've seen enough already.


Are you kidding? Think of it - a machine which could visualise anything you can think of in your mind. Think of an idea, or a scenario or a picture, and there it is. Hook that fucker up to a laser prototyper and - presto.

There have to be some interesting applications outside the realm of the creation of mindless citizen consumer-golems.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Postby §ê¢rꆧ » Fri Nov 06, 2009 7:47 pm

Luther Blissett wrote:Supposedly the corresponding image on the monitor was that of Indy but with a cat's face.

...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLb9EIiSyG8



This is crazy! I suppose not surprising, I mean don't you as a human sort of see your cat as having human features?

I don't understand why they used such a grainy, pixelated video to begin with (or at least it looks like it in the youtube video posted). He's a screenshot:

Image

Meow.
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Postby Code Unknown » Thu Nov 12, 2009 2:51 am

justdrew wrote:Hmmm... I need to see this: 2004's Land of Plenty

another brilliant film completely lost on Ignorant America


No you don't. And this is coming from a fan of Wenders' better movies (namely Until the End of the World and Wings of Desire).
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Postby Code Unknown » Thu Nov 12, 2009 3:00 am

§ê¢rꆧ wrote:I don't understand why they used such a grainy, pixelated video to begin with (or at least it looks like it in the youtube video posted).


Yeah, I don't get that either.
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Postby justdrew » Thu Nov 12, 2009 3:54 am

Code Unknown wrote:
justdrew wrote:Hmmm... I need to see this: 2004's Land of Plenty

another brilliant film completely lost on Ignorant America


No you don't. And this is coming from a fan of Wenders' better movies (namely Until the End of the World and Wings of Desire).


aw well, thanks for the warning. Yeah, those two are my favs too. Der Himmel über Berlin, that old poet:

When the child was a child, it was the time of these questions. Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Isn't life under the sun just a dream? Isn't what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? How can it be that I, who am I, wasn't before I was, and that sometime I, the one I am, no longer will be the one I am?

===

Tell me, muse, of the storyteller who has been thrust to the edge of the world, both an infant and an ancient, and through him reveal everyman. With time, those who listened to me became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, bur rather sit apart. And one doesn't know anything about the other. I'm an old man with a broken voice, but the tale still rises from the depths, and the mouth, slightly opened, repeats it as clearly, as powerfully. A liturgy for which no one needs to be initiated to the meaning of words and sentences.
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Postby Code Unknown » Thu Nov 12, 2009 4:12 am

Indeed.
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Postby brainpanhandler » Thu Nov 12, 2009 5:52 am

barracuda wrote:
Maddy wrote:I don't want to live to see this. I've seen enough already.


Are you kidding? Think of it - a machine which could visualise anything you can think of in your mind. Think of an idea, or a scenario or a picture, and there it is. Hook that fucker up to a laser prototyper and - presto.

There have to be some interesting applications outside the realm of the creation of mindless citizen consumer-golems.


The mind boggles, but if you were a highly advanced benevolent alien for which a perfected form of this technology is child's play would you give this kind of technology to the human race at our current stage of d/evolution?

There is only one last place in this universe where I have more than the illusion of some privacy and that's in my frickin' noggin and I'll be goddamned if I want to live to see the day when even that is gone.

I mean I'm all for role swapping sex, but it ain't worth it.
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby cptmarginal » Thu Jun 02, 2011 9:42 pm

Jose Delgado, eat your heart out.




via TED.com

The part where they restored a mouse's sight was incredible


Transcript:

Think about your day for a second. You woke up, felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door, encountered new colleagues and had great discussions, and felt at awe when you found something new. But I bet there's something you didn't think about today -- something so close to home that you probably don't think about it very often at all. And that's that all the sensations, feelings, decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called the brain.

Now the brain may not look like much from the outside -- a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh, amorphous -- but the last hundred years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain, and to see the intricacy of what lies within. And they've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons. Now unlike a human-designed computer, where there's a fairly small number of different parts -- we know how they work, because we humans designed them -- the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells, maybe tens of thousands. They come in different shapes; they're made out of different molecules; and they project and connect to different brain regions. And they also change different ways in different disease states.

Let's make it concrete. There's a class of cells, a fairly small cell, an inhibitory cell, that quiets its neighbors. It's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in orders like schizophrenia. It's called the basket cell. And this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we are learning about. New ones are being discovered everyday. As just a second example: these pyramidal cells, large cells, they can span a significant fraction of the brain. They're excitatory. And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy. Every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device. They receive input from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs, which then, if they pass a certain threshold, will go to thousands of downstream partners. And this process, which takes just a millisecond or so, happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells, as long as you live and think and feel.

So how are we going to figure out what this circuit does? Ideally, we could go through the circuit and turn these different kinds of cell on and off and see whether we could figure out which ones contribute to certain functions and which ones go wrong in certain pathologies. If we could activate cells, we could see what powers they can unleash, what they can initiate and sustain. If we could turn them off, then we could try and figure out what they're necessary for. And that's a story I'm going to tell you about today. And honestly, where we've gone through over the last 11 years, through an attempt to find ways of turning circuits and cells and parts and pathways of the brain on and off, both to understand the science, and also to confront some of the issues that face us all as humans.

Now before I tell you about the technology, the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room, if we live long enough, will encounter, perhaps, a brain disorder. Already, a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them. And the numbers don't do it justice though. These disorders -- schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction -- they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are; they take our identity and change our emotions -- and change who we are as people. Now in the 20th century, there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders. And while many drugs have been developed that can alleviate symptoms of brain disorders, practically none of them can be considered to be cured. And part of that's because, we're bathing the brain in the chemical. This elaborate circuit made out of thousands of different kinds of cell is being bathed in a substance. That's also why, perhaps most of the drugs, and not all, on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too.

Now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain. And for Parkinson's disease, Cochlear implants, these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder. But electricity also will go in all directions -- the path of least resistance, which is where that phrase, in part, comes from. And it also will affect normal circuits as well as the abnormal ones that you want to fix. So again, we're sent back to the idea of ultra-precise control. Could we dial in information precisely where we want it to go?

So when I started in neuroscience 11 years ago, I had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist, and the first thing I thought about was, if these neurons are electrical devices, all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance. If we could turn on the electricity in one cell, but not its neighbors, that would give us the tool we need to activate and shut down these different cells, figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they're embedded. And also it would allow us to have the ultra-precise control we need in order to fix the circuit computations that have gone awry. Now how are we going to do that? Well there are many molecules that exist in nature, which are able to convert light into electricity. You can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells. If we can install these molecules in neurons somehow, then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light. And their neighbors, which don't have the molecule, would not. There's one other magic trick you need to make this all happen, and that's the ability to get light into the brain. And to do that -- the brain doesn't feel pain -- you can put -- taking advantage of all the effort that's gone into the Internet and communications and so on -- optical fibers connected to lasers that you can use to activate, in animal models for example, in pre-clinical studies, these neurons and to see what they do.

So how do we do this? Around 2004, in collaboration with Gerhard Nagel and Karl Deisseroth, this vision came to fruition. There's a certain alga that swims in the wild, and it needs to navigate towards light in order to photosynthesize optimally. And it senses light with a little eye-spot, which works not unlike how our eye works. In its membrane, or its boundary, it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity. So these molecules are called channelrhodospins. And each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that I told you about. When blue light hits it, it opens up a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eye-spot. And that allows this eye-spot to have an electrical signal just like a solar cell charging up a battery.

So what we need to do is to take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons. And because it's a protein, it's encoded for in the DNA of this organism. So all we've got to do is take that DNA, put it into a gene therapy vector, like a virus, and put it into neurons. So it turned out that this was a very productive time in gene therapy, and lots of viruses were coming along. So this turned out to be very simple to do. And early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004, we gave it a try, and it worked on the first try. You take this DNA and you put it into a neuron. The neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell, like putting solar panels on a roof. And next thing you know, you have a neuron which can be activated with light. So this is very powerful.

One of the tricks you have to do is to figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells that you want and not all the other neighbors. And you can do that; you can tweak the viruses so they hit just some cells and not others. And there's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells. This field has now come to be known as optogenetics. And just as one example of the kind of thing you can do, you can take a complex network, use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network. And then when you shine light on the entire network, just that cell type will be activated.

So for example, lets sort of consider that basket cell I told you about earlier -- the one that's atrophied in schizophrenia and that is inhibitory. If we can deliver that gene to these cells -- and they're not going to be altered by the expression of the gene, of course -- and then flash blue light over the entire brain network, just these cells are going to be driven. And when the light turns off, these cells go back to normal, so they don't seem to be averse against that. Not only can you use this to study what these cells do, what their power is in computing in the brain, but you can also use this to try to figure out -- well maybe we could jazz up the activity of these cells, if indeed they're atrophied.

Now I want to tell you a couple of short stories about how we're using this, both at the scientific, clinical and pre-clinical levels. One of the questions we've confronted is, what are the signals in the brain that mediate the sensation of reward? Because if you could find those, those would be some of the signals that could drive learning. The brain will do more of whatever got that reward. And also these are signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction. So if we could figure out what cells they are, we could maybe find new targets for which drugs could be designed or screened against, or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have very severe disability. So to do that, we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the Fiorella group, where one side of this little box, if the animal goes there, the animal gets a pulse of light in order to make different cells in the brain sensitive to light. So if these cells can mediate reward, the animal should go there more and more. And so that's what happens.

This animal's going to go to the right-hand side and poke his nose there, and he gets a flash of blue light every time he does that. And he'll do that hundreds and hundreds of times. These are the dopamine neurons, which some of you may have heard about in some of the pleasure centers in the brain. Now we've shown that a brief activation of these is enough, indeed, to drive learning. Now we can generalize the idea. Instead of one point in the brain, we can devise devices that span the brain, that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns -- arrays of optical fibers, each coupled to its own independent miniature light source. And then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to-date in a dish -- like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen. Or they could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders.

And one story I want to tell you about is how can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder -- a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear. And one of the things that we did was to adopt a very classical model of fear. This goes back to the Pavlovian days. It's called Pavlovian fear conditioning -- where a tone ends with a brief shock. The shock isn't painful, but it's a little annoying. And over time -- in this case, a mouse, which is a good animal model, commonly used in such experiments -- the animal learns to fear the tone. The animal will react by freezing, sort of like a deer in the headlights. Now the question is, what targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear? So what we do is we play that tone again after it's been associated with fear. But we activate targets in the brain, different ones, using that optical fiber array I told you about in the previous slide, in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear.

And so this brief video shows you one of these targets that we're working on now. This is an area in the prefrontal cortex, a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states. And the animal's going to hear a tone -- and a flash of light occurred there. There's no audio on this, but you can see the animal's freezing. This tone used to mean bad news. And there's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner, so you can see the animal is about two minutes into this. And now this next clip is just eight minutes later. And the same tone is going to play, and the light is going to flash again. Okay, there it goes. Right now. And now you can see, just 10 minutes into the experiment, that we've equipped the brain by photoactivating this area to overcome the expression of this fear memory.

Now over the last couple of years, we've gone back to the tree of life, because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off. If we could do that, this could be extremely powerful. If you can delete cells just for a few milliseconds or seconds, you can figure out what necessary role they play in the circuits in which they're embedded. And we've now surveyed organisms from all over the tree of life -- every kingdom of life except for animals, we see slightly differently. And we found all sorts of molecules, they're called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins, that respond to green and yellow light. And they do the opposite thing of the molecule I told you about before with the blue light activator channelrhodopsin.

Let's give an example of where we think this is going to go. Consider for example a condition like epilepsy, where the brain is overactive. Now if drugs fail in epileptic treatment, one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain. But that's obviously irreversible, and there could be side effects. What if we could just turn off that brain for a brief amount of time, until the seizure dies away, and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state -- sort of like a dynamical system that's being coaxed down into a stable state. So this animation just tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light, and we beam light in, and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure, we're hoping to be able to turn it off. And so we don't have data to show you on this front, but we're very excited about this.

Now I want to close on one story, which we think is another possibility -- which is that maybe these molecules, if you can do ultra-precise control, can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic, an optical prosthetic. I already told you that electrical stimulators are not in common. 75,000 people have Parkinson's deep-brain stimulators implanted. Maybe 100,000 people have Cochlear implants, which allow them to hear. There's another thing, which is you've got to get these genes into cells. And new hope in gene therapy has been developed because viruses like the adeno-associated virus, which probably most of us around this room have, and it doesn't have any symptoms, which have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body. And so far, there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus.

There's one last elephant in the room, the proteins themselves, which come from algae and bacteria and fungi, and all over the tree of life. Most of us don't have fungi or algae in our brains, so what is our brain going to do if we put that in? Are the cells going to tolerate it? Will the immune system react? In its early days -- these have not been done on humans yet -- but we're working on a variety of studies to try and examine this. And so far we haven't seen overt reactions of any severity to these molecules or to the illumination of the brain with light. So it's early days, to be upfront, but we're excited about it.

I wanted to close with one story, which we think could potentially be a clinical application. Now there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors, our light sensors that are in the back of our eye, are gone. And the retina, of course, is a complex structure. Now let's zoom in on it here, so we can see it in more detail. the photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top, and then the signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed by various computations, until finally that layer of cells at the bottom, the ganglion cells, relay the information to the brain, where we see that as perception. In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa, or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed. Now how could you repair this? It's not even clear that a drug could cause this to be restored, because there's nothing for the drug to bind to. On the other hand, light can still get into the eye. The light is still transparent and you can get light in. So what if we could just take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spare cells and convert them into little cameras. And because there's so many of these cells in the eye, potentially, they could be very high-resolution cameras.

So this is some work that we're doing. It's being led by one of our collaborators, Alan Horsager at USC, and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company Eos Neuroscience, funded by the NIH. And what you see here is a mouse trying to solve a maze. It's a six-arm maze. And there's a bit of water in the maze to motivate the mouse to move, or he'll just sit there. And the goal, of course, of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that's under the lit top port. Now mice are smart, so this mouse solves the maze eventually, but he does a brute-force search. He's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform. So he's not using vision to do it. These different mice are different mutations that portray different kinds of blindness that affect humans. And so we're being careful in trying to look at these different models, so we come up with a generalized approach.

So how are we going to solve this? We're going to do exactly what we outlined in the previous slide. We're going to take these blue light photosensors and install them on a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera. Just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light sensitive. light is converted to electricity on them. So this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule in a virus. And now you can see, the animal can indeed avoid walls and go to this little platform and make cognitive use of its eyes again. And to point out the power of this: these animals are able to get to that platform just as fast as animals that have seen their entire lives. So this pre-clinical study, I think, bodes hope for the kinds of things we're hoping to do in the future.

To close, I want to point out that we're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology. We're developing these tools, but we share them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world, so people can study and try to treat different disorders. And our hope is that, by figuring out brain circuits at a level of abstraction that lets us repair them and engineer them, we can take some of these intractable disorders that I told you about earlier, practically none of which are cured, and in the 21st century make them history.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Juan Enriquez: So some of the stuff is a little dense. (Laughter) But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs, and being able to target those specifically is a first step. The second thing that I think I heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors. Like an on/off switch.

Ed Boyden: That's right.

JE: Which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code.

EB: Right, yeah. So with blue light, we can drive information, and it's in the form of a one. And by turning it soft, it's more or less a zero. So our hope is to eventually build brain coprocessors that work with the brain, so we can augment functions in people with disabilities.

JE: And in theory, that means that, as a mouse feels, smells, hears, touches, you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros.

EB: Sure, yeah. We're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings, and use that to understand more about the brain.

JE: Does that mean that some day you could download memories and maybe upload them?

EB: Well that's something we're starting to work on very hard. We're now working on some work where we're trying to tile the brain with recording elements too. So we can record information and then drive information back in -- sort of computing what the brain needs in order to augment its information processing.

JE: Well, that might change a couple things. Thank you. (EB: Thank you.)

(Applause)
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby Luther Blissett » Sat Sep 24, 2011 10:18 pm

This is what the earlier cat-faced Indiana Jones experiments begat. Eerily dream-like editorialized videos of mapped brains.



Scientists Reconstruct Brains’ Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment
UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

I just can't believe this is happening for real, but according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—"this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."

Indeed, it's mindblowing. I'm simultaneously excited and terrified. This is how it works:

They used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain's blood flow through their brains' visual cortex.

The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity.
An 18-million-second picture palette

After recording this information, another group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie. Although the resulting video is low resolution and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects.

Think about those 18 million seconds of random videos as a painter's color palette. A painter sees a red rose in real life and tries to reproduce the color using the different kinds of reds available in his palette, combining them to match what he's seeing. The software is the painter and the 18 million seconds of random video is its color palette. It analyzes how the brain reacts to certain stimuli, compares it to the brain reactions to the 18-million-second palette, and picks what more closely matches those brain reactions. Then it combines the clips into a new one that duplicates what the subject was seeing. Notice that the 18 million seconds of motion video are not what the subject is seeing. They are random bits used just to compose the brain image.

Given a big enough database of video material and enough computing power, the system would be able to re-create any images in your brain.

Scientists Reconstruct Brains' Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment In this other video you can see how this process worked in the three experimental targets. On the top left square you can see the movie the subjects were watching while they were in the fMRI machine. Right below you can see the movie "extracted" from their brain activity. It shows that this technique gives consistent results independent of what's being watched—or who's watching. The three lines of clips next to the left column show the random movies that the computer program used to reconstruct the visual information.

Right now, the resulting quality is not good, but the potential is enormous. Lead research author—and one of the lab test bunnies—Shinji Nishimoto thinks this is the first step to tap directly into what our brain sees and imagines:

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.


The brain recorders of the future

Imagine that. Capturing your visual memories, your dreams, the wild ramblings of your imagination into a video that you and others can watch with your own eyes.

This is the first time in history that we have been able to decode brain activity and reconstruct motion pictures in a computer screen. The path that this research opens boggles the mind. It reminds me of Brainstorm, the cult movie in which a group of scientists lead by Christopher Walken develops a machine capable of recording the five senses of a human being and then play them back into the brain itself.

This new development brings us closer to that goal which, I have no doubt, will happen at one point. Given the exponential increase in computing power and our understanding of human biology, I think this will arrive sooner than most mortals expect. Perhaps one day you would be able to go to sleep wearing a flexible band labeled Sony Dreamcam around your skull. [UC Berkeley]

http://gizmodo.com/5843117/scientists-r ... n-activity
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby elfismiles » Sat Sep 24, 2011 11:35 pm

Thank you thank you thank you LB!!!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMA23JJ1M1o

Luther Blissett wrote:This is what the earlier cat-faced Indiana Jones experiments begat. Eerily dream-like editorialized videos of mapped brains.
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby Luther Blissett » Sat Sep 24, 2011 11:37 pm

Nordic beat me to it by over a full day, man.
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Re: One Step Closer to a Dream Recorder

Postby elfismiles » Fri Oct 28, 2011 11:17 am


IBM Simulates 4.5 percent of the Human Brain, and All of the Cat Brain
A special online-only addition to November 2011's Graphic Science
By Mark Fischetti | October 25, 2011 | 21

Supercomputers can store more information than the human brain and can calculate a single equation faster, but even the biggest, fastest supercomputers in the world cannot match the overall processing power of the brain. And they are nowhere near as compact or energy efficient.

Nevertheless, IBM is trying to simulate the human brain with its own cutting-edge supercomputer, called Blue Gene. For the simulation, it used 147,456 processors working in parallel with one another. IBM researchers say each processor is roughly equivalent to the one found in a personal computer, with one gigabyte of working memory.

So configured, Blue Gene simulated 4.5 percent of the brain's neurons and the connections among them called synapses—that's about one billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. In total, the brain has roughly 20 billion neurons and 200 trillion synapses.

IBM describes the work in an intriguing paper (pdf) that compares various animal simulations done by its cognitive computing research group in Almaden, Calif. The group has managed to completely simulate the brain of a mouse (512 processors), rat (2,048) and cat (24,576). To rival the cortex inside your head, IBM predicts it will need to hook up 880,000 processors, which it hopes to achieve by 2019.

Read more about Computers vs. Brains in the November 2011 issue of Scientific American.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -vs-brains


http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... -cat-brain

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