Guess what if you are aware of what one is thinking at present! What thoughts are going on in one’s mind! And finally you are able to read other’s mind. These all talks seem to be if we are having chit-chat from any sci-fi movies and it would be a fascinating new technology, bringing some scenes from sci-fi movies closer to reality.

But dear readers, you will be amazed to know that this talk is no more futuristic as the scientists namely associate professor of psychology Jack Gallant and two researchers, Kendrick Kay and Thomas Naselaris, have made it possible. Dr. Jack Gallant is a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley. They first worked on a computer program to recognize which of a set of 1,750 photos Kay and Naselaris were looking at while their brains were scanned by an FMRI machine (functional magnetic resonance imaging) of the sort ordinarily used in hospitals.

To do this, they made unique mathematical models of each photo, most of which were black-and-white images of familiar objects scaled down to only 64 x 64 pixels, not much bigger than the thumbnail images you see in the photo box to the left.

They also took functional MRI images of blood flow in Kay and Naselaris’ visual cortices, the areas in the back of their brains that process visual information, while they looked at each photo — and then made unique mathematical models of the brain images as well.

Kay and Naselaris were each shown 120 new photos they hadn’t seen before while their brains were scanned.Using the pre-established patterns, the computer was able to match the new scans to the new pictures with an amazing degree of accuracy. The program then picked the most likely match from a set of previously unseen pictures with an accuracy of 92%.

“You can imagine using this for dream analysis, or psychotherapy. This research makes clear that there’s a huge amount of information, way more than we have expected and that we can dig out of fMRI signals to get a better understanding of brain function.”

Soon Yukiyasu Kamitani at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan has gone a step further. His team has used an image of brain activity taken in a functional MRI scanner to recreate a black-and-white image from scratch.

“By analyzing the brain signals when someone is seeing an image, we can reconstruct that image,” says Kamitani.

This means that the mind reading isn’t limited to a selection of existing images, but could potentially be used to “read off” anything that someone was thinking of, without prior knowledge of what that might be.

Working of Project-The Dream Catcher:- Kamitani starts by getting someone to look at a selection of images made up of black and white squares on a 10 by 10 square grid, while having their brain scanned. Software then finds patterns in brain activity that corresponds to certain pixels being blacked out. It uses this to record a signature pattern of brain activity for each pixel.

The person then sits in the scanner and is shown fresh patterns. Another piece of software then matches these against the list to reconstruct the pixels on a 10 by 10 grid.

The quality of images that were recreated is quite crude. However, the word “neuron” and several numbers and shapes that people were indeed being shown (see image, top right) could be observed in the reconstructed images. It is an important proof of principle, says Haynes.

As fMRI technology improves, Kamitani adds that an image could potentially be split into many more pixels, producing much higher quality images, and even colour images.

The next step is to find out if it is possible to image things that people are thinking of – as well as what they are looking at – Haynes says it may be possible to “make a videotape of a dream”.

Positive and Negative Potential:- So this technology can have some very positive as well as negative potential. On positive, it can be used to assess damage from strokes, the effect of drug treatments or to help diagnose conditions such as dementia. It can be helpful in queries with criminals. But as well taking the negative it could have a very serious impact on our privacy and other issues if the research goes on very fine flights with possibility to have colorful imaging outputs.

So just wait and watch what more these scientists and researchers are having to give up.

Reference :- http://www.newscientist.com http://www.foxnews.com