Brain "Movies".......

Scientists use brain imaging to reveal the movies in our mind

By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | September 22, 2011

Psychology and neuroscience professor Jack Gallant displays videos and brain images used in his research. Video produced by Roxanne Makasdjian, Media Relations.

BERKELEY — Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

Eventually, practical applications of the technology could include a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people who cannot communicate verbally, such as stroke victims, coma patients and people with neurodegenerative diseases.“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today (Sept. 22) in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

It may also lay the groundwork for brain-machine interface so that people with cerebral palsy or paralysis, for example, can guide computers with their minds.

However, researchers point out that the technology is decades from allowing users to read others’ thoughts and intentions, as portrayed in such sci-fi classics as “Brainstorm,” in which scientists recorded a person’s sensations so that others could experience them.

Previously, Gallant and fellow researchers recorded brain activity in the visual cortex while a subject viewed black-and-white photographs. They then built a computational model that enabled them to predict with overwhelming accuracy which picture the subject was looking at.

In their latest experiment, researchers say they have solved a much more difficult problem by actually decoding brain signals generated by moving pictures.

“Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie,” said Shinji Nishimoto, lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in Gallant’s lab. “In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.”  

Mind-reading through brain imaging technology is a common sci-fi theme

Nishimoto and two other research team members served as subjects for the experiment, because the procedure requires volunteers to remain still inside the MRI scanner for hours at a time.

They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or “voxels.”

“We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity,” Nishimoto said.

The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.

Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.

Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.

Reconstructing movies using brain scans has been challenging because the blood flow signals measured using fMRI change much more slowly than the neural signals that encode dynamic information in movies, researchers said. For this reason, most previous attempts to decode brain activity have focused on static images.

“We addressed this problem by developing a two-stage model that separately describes the underlying neural population and blood flow signals,” Nishimoto said.

Ultimately, Nishimoto said, scientists need to understand how the brain processes dynamic visual events that we experience in everyday life.

“We need to know how the brain works in naturalistic conditions,” he said. “For that, we need to first understand how the brain works while we are watching movies.”

Other coauthors of the study are Thomas Naselaris with UC Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; An T. Vu with UC Berkeley’s Joint Graduate Group in Bioengineering; and Yuval Benjamini and Professor Bin Yu with the UC Berkeley Department of Statistics.

RELATED INFORMATION

• Gallant Lab website, with more details about the study

Ref http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/

The Fundamental Fysiks Group.

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	The Fundamental Fysiks Group, City Magazine, 1975. Left to right: Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Nick Herbert, and Fred Alan Wolf (seated)

The Fundamental Fysiks Group was founded in San Francisco in May 1975 by two physicists, Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, at the time both graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The group held informal discussions on Friday afternoons to explore the philosophical implications of quantum theory. Leading members included Fritjof Capra, John Clauser, Philippe Eberhard, Nick Herbert, Jack Sarfatti, Saul-Paul Sirag, Henry Stapp, and Fred Alan Wolf.^[1]
David Kaiser argues, in How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (2011), that the group's meetings and papers helped to nurture the ideas in quantum physics that came to form the basis of quantum information science.^[2] Two reviewers wrote that Kaiser may have exaggerated the group's influence on the future of physics research, though one of them, Silvan Schweber, wrote that some of the group's contributions are easy to identify, such as Clauser's experimental evidence for non-locality attracting a share of the Wolf Prize in 2010, and the publication of Capra's The Tao of Physics (1975) and Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters (1979) attracting the interest of a wider audience.^[3]
Kaiser writes that the group were "very smart and very playful," discussing quantum mysticism and becoming local celebrities in the Bay Area's counterculture. When Francis Ford Coppola bought City Magazine in 1975, one of its earliest features was on the Fundamental Fysiks Group, including a photo spread of Sirag, Wolf, Herbert, and Sarfatti.^[4]

Contents [hide] 1 Research 1.1 Bell's theorem and no-cloning theorem 1.2 Remote viewing 2 See also 3 Notes 4 Further reading

[edit] Research

[edit] Bell's theorem and no-cloning theorem

Hugh Gusterson writes that several challenging ideas lie at the heart of quantum physics: that electrons behave like waves and particles; that you can know a particle's location or momentum, but not both; that observing a particle changes its behavior; and that particles appear to communicate with each other across great distances, known as nonlocality and quantum entanglement. It is these concepts that led to the development of quantum information science and quantum encryption, which has been experimentally used, for example, to transfer money and electronic votes.^[5] Kaiser argues that the Fundamental Fysiks Group saved physics by exploring these ideas, in three ways:

They self-consciously opened up space again ... for the kind of spirited philosophical engagement with fundamental physics that the Cold War decades had dampened. More than most of their generation, they sought to recapture the big-picture search for meaning that had driven their heroes—Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger—and to smuggle that mode of doing physics back into their daily routine.Second, members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group latched onto a topic, known as "Bell's theorem," and rescued it from a decade of unrelenting obscurity. The theorem ... stipulated that quantum objects that had once interacted would retain some strange link or connection, even after they had moved arbitrarily far apart from each other. ... Working in various genres and media, the Fundamental Fysiks Group grappled with Bell's theorem and quantum entanglement. ... In the process, they forced a few of their physicist peers to pay attention to the topic ... From these battles, quantum information science was born.
The hippie physicists' concerted push on Bell's theorem and quantum entanglement instigated major breakthroughs ... The most important became known as the "no-cloning theorem," a new insight into quantum theory that emerged from spirited efforts to wrestle with hypothetical machines dreamed up by members of the Fundamental Fysiks Group.^[6]

Specifically, in 1981, Nick Herbert, a member of the group, proposed a scheme for sending signals faster than the speed of light using quantum entanglement.^[7] Quantum computing pioneer Asher Peres writes that the refutation of Herbert's ideas led to the development of the no-cloning theorem by William Wootters, Wojciech Zurek, and Dennis Dieks.^[8]
In a review of Kaiser's book in Physics Today, Silvan Schweber challenges Kaiser's views of the importance of the Fundamental Fysiks Group. He writes that Bell's Theorem was not obscure during the preceding decade, but was worked on by authors such as John Clauser (who was a member of the group) and Eugene Wigner. Schweber also mentioned the work of Alain Aspect, which preceded Nick Herbert's 1981 proposal.^[9]

[edit] Remote viewing

Given quantum theory's implications for the study of parapsychology and telepathy, the group cultivated patrons such as the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and human potential movement. The CIA and DIA set up a program called ESPionage, financing experiments into remote viewing at the Stanford Research Institute, where the Fundamental Fysiks Group became what Kaiser calls its house theorists.^[10]

[edit] See also

• The Men Who Stare at Goats

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Kaiser, David. How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival. W W Norton & Co Inc, 2011, p. xi–xvii, xxiii, 43ff, 101.
2. ^ Kaiser 2011, p. xi–xvii.
3. ^ Johnson, George. "What Physics Owes the Counterculture", The New York Times, June 17, 2011.
   • Schweber, Silvan. "How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival", Times Higher Education, March 13, 2012.
   • Schweber, Silvan. "Review: How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival", Physics Today, September 2011, pp. 59-60.
4. ^ Kaiser lecture,^{[dead link]} 21:00 mins, 23:22 mins; Kaiser 2011, p. xviii.
5. ^ Gusterson, Hugh. "Physics: Quantum outsiders", Nature, 476, 278–279, August 18, 2011.
6. ^ Kaiser 2011, pp. xiii–xxxv.
7. ^ Herbert, Nick. "FLASH—A superluminal communicator based upon a new kind of quantum measurement", Foundation of Physics, vol 12, issue 12, 1982, pp. 1171–117.
8. ^ Peres, Asher. "How the No-Cloning Theorem Got its Name", Fortschritte der Physik, vol 51, issue 4–5, May 2003, pp. 458–461.
9. ^ Schweber, Silvan. "How the Hippies Saved Physics - Reviewed by Silvan Schweber", Physics Today, September 2011, 59-60.
10. ^ Kaiser, David. "Lecture: How the Hippies Saved Physics", WGBH PBS, April 28, 2010, around 28:00 mins.

[edit] Further reading

• "25th reunion of the Fundamental Physics Group", quantumtantra.com, accessed August 18, 2011.
• "Paranormal Science", The New York Times, November 6, 1974.
• "How the Hippies Saved Physics (Excerpt)", Scientific American, June 27, 2011.
• Dizikes, Peter. "Hippie Days", MIT News, June 27, 2011.
• Wisnioski, Matthew. "Let's Be Fysiksists Again", Science, vol 332, issue 6037, 24 June, 2011, pp. 1504–1505.

Books

• Fritjof Capra. The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Shambhala Publications, 1975.
• Amit Goswami. The Self-Aware Universe. Tarcher, 1995.
• Jack Sarfatti. Space-Time and Beyond, with Fred Alan Wolf and Bob Toben, E. P. Dutton, 1975.
• Evan Harris Walker. The Physics of Consciousness: The Quantum Mind and the Meaning of Life. Da Capo Press, 2000.
• Ken Wilber (ed). Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists. Shambhala Publications, 2001 (first published 1984).
• Gary Zukav. The Dancing Wu Li Masters. HarperOne, 2001 (first published 1979).