information aesthetics

a new scientific mind-reading technique that is able to to accurately predict images being viewed by people, using quite advanced brain activity scanners (fMRI).

"the study raises the possibility in future of the technology being harnessed to visualize scenes from a person's dreams or memory... to reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone. imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person's visual experience at any moment in time".

first, custom-made software analyzes a subject's visual cortex while they view 1000s of images over 5 hours, to learn how that person's brain codes visual information. then, the decoder is able to predict the brain activity it would expect if the subject is viewing a new set of images.

sounds like a great tool to research how people "visualize" abstract concepts?

[link: guardian.co.uk]