Acetio | Blogma

Sometimes music seems like an attempt to express natural sounds - those of the streets of a city, or of a storm, or of the beach; or more likely, the sounds of a conversation.

And many of my efforts to make works of creative expression are really just attempts to replicate images I had in my head when waking from a dream. Stories as well, often begin by jotting down details I strain to recall from dreams.

How many times have you had a conversation with someone, wishing you had a device that could record dreams or the images of memories the way we record with cameras? For me, the answer is, "a lot."

So it was with fascination that I read, Japanese Group Reconstructs Visual Images from Brain Activity Patterns. (As opposed to non-visual images?) It's an absurd idea, and also secretly awesome, kind of like reading a headline that reads "Brazilian Hermaphrodite Impregnates Self". Think of the implications!

It's been a few years that the technology has existed to extract simple, 1-dimensional imagery from the brain, allowing paralyzed people to operate a computer. This works essentially by collecting 2-pixel images from the brain in order to extrapolate basic cardinal directions (up, down, left, and right). (I saw a demo of this a few years ago in San Francisco at the Game Developers' Conference. The idea was to give gamers yet another input device when all ten fingers and thumbs were occupied)

And the big leap with this new technology builds on that, gathering multiple 2-pixel blocks in order to generate 10-pixel x 10-pixel images.

The images are blurry, and black-and-white, but that's not so different from the early visual systems of primitive creatures. Some developments in robotics are measured against the evolutionary scale. Early robots were no more intelligent than bacteria, but some are now as intelligent as an ant, and some may be nearly as intelligent as a frog, although none are anywhere near as smart as a dog, for example.

And similarly, if we've mastered the capturing of visual brain activity equivalent to that of a nematode's, perhaps within 10 years we will have reached the equivalent of a fruit fly. (An interesting scientific article explaining what dogs and cats actually see.)

Of course, this mind-reading device is a huge MRI machine (formerly called "Nuclear Magnetic Resonance" or NMR, but the first word in that name scared off a lot of people, so now it's just MRI - Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and one of the challenges will be to miniaturize the technology, down to the size of a headband, or at least one of those big dryers at hair salons - the things that look like helmets on sticks. Imagine waking up in the morning and sitting under one of those things for a few minutes to gather the imagery from the dream you just woke from.

This all reaffirms my sense of how weird and wonderful the human brain is, and also how science is still successfully climbing the ziggurat of knowledge, one step at a time.