An awesome short film by Michael Horn featuring the Death Star and various Star Wars spacecraft flying around San Francisco during Imperial Fleet Week. Bonnie Burton interviewed Michael about his video over on The Official Star Wars Blog.
February 01, 2009
January 29, 2009
December 23, 2008
Dream Camera
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.
The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.
Then, when the test subjects were shown a completely new set of images, such as the letters N-E-U-R-O-N, the system was able to reconstruct and display what the test subjects were viewing based solely on their brain activity. [via]
This reminds me of Until the End of the World, one of my favorite movies, where William Hurt's character uses his father's invention, a camera that records your brain reacting to the act of seeing, to collect "footage" for his blind mother. And, like the movie, dream-viewing looks like the next step. Yikes.
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This weblog highlights the funny, interesting, nifty or otherwise cool nuggets I come across on the web.
