I'm going to love it. Finally a way to make visual art without learning Photoshop! Put some holographic projection on top of it and there will be guys walking around like that one called Riviera from the Neuromancer novel. 

Furthermore, sometimes before I go to sleep, I hear music. No shit, a real music, quite original, which I never heard before. Stuff like rock music or even baroque symphony. I'd love to record that some time.

Wow. It's one thing to imagine it, or even to read about it, but to actually see it working. Even if it's blurry like that. That's fucking awesome.

I have a sneaking feeling that they will never get sharp reconstructions. At least, not until the reconstruction software itself becomes almost brain-like, making its own associations.

This reminds me of two very cool things.

First, the images remind me of the movie Waking Life, which was quite a cool movie.

Second, when they show the clip with the elephant, there are words/letters overlaid on top of the elephant. This reminded me of the extremely mind-blowing book, Reading In the Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene. From reading that book, I think I understand why the words appear over the elephant, but not over things like a human face, or more familiar things. Because elephants are fairly unfamiliar, a lot of our understanding of them comes from what we've read about them, and actual visual experiences of elephants are relatively rare. I suppose a zoo keeper who deals with elephants regularly would have shown a more accurate, less blurry image of the elephant, without any words floating there, because they would have a stronger conceptual/perceptual understanding of the elephant in more-intuitive depth, without the need to supplement it with words/letters. If this sounds crazy, read the book, it's amazing.

Lol.

Seriously, though. I've thought for a long time (several years, anyway) that once we get the ability to control technology with our minds (it already exists, in weak but functional form, and there's even a company marketing a commercially available video-game controller using this tech), then it will be a short skip and a jump to being able to communicate by technologically assisted telepathy. Imagine if, instead of typing this message, I just thought the words, the interface records them, and posts them for me at a thought.

Forget keyboards. Forget those crappy, tiny little buttons on your phone or whatever. The ultimate human-machine interface is just around the corner. Brain to computer. Computer to brain (or at least visual/audio feedback). Everything you do now on computers. Imagine doing the same thing at a thought. Way faster, way more convenient. No intrusive technology, just very sensitive brain scanning.

Which makes me wonder. I'm betting that they had to insert neural probes to get this kind of resolution. If it was done with something like MRI, that would be ginormous leap.

Edit: Holy shit, it was MRI!

Yes, I realized that later, too, when I was re-considering the details mentioned in the article (same ones you're talking about), but I hadn't fully thought through. It is a very clever technique they used to improve the ability to visualize what the person is seeing in their mind's eye.

I suppose it's a little bit reminiscent of those composite images, where they have all these little tiny images on a poster, that form a kind of mosaic which viewed from a moderate distance looks like a completely different picture. The first one of those I saw was made up of tiny shots from the Star Wars movies and the overall mosaic was of Darth Vader. Not exactly the same thing going on in the bran scan, but somewhat similar.

I wonder if this technique can be improved, and what it would take to do so.