…we may conclude that Philip K Dick wrote nonfiction.
Reading another person’s mind is impossible. But it is now possible to see what’s going on in there visually, thanks to scientists at the University of California-Berkeley, who on Thursday announced they had managed to decode the brain signals of three individuals into watchable movies. YouTube movies, to be exact.
The scientists used MRI to record the brain activity of subjects as they watched movie trailers.
Then, the team took the recorded brain signals and ran them through a database of 18-million-seconds of random YouTube clips, but specifically didn’t include clips of the trailers that the subjects had been watching in the first place.
Berkley’s computer program was able to pick out new clips visually similar to the subjects’ brain imagery and mash them together into composites, creating eerie, hallucinatory new movies that replicate with startling accuracy the exact scenes that subjects saw in the trailers, frame-for-frame.