Editorial spot: Concepts

The news article I decided to do is an article about a "new technology [that] uses brain scans to see what a person is watching." It appeared on ScienceNews.org, titled "The mind's eye revealed." If you're interested in the most recent paper about it by the scientists, it was published in Current Biology.*

The tagline implies something that isn't totally true--the scientists didn't just hook a computer up to a brain and record what the person was watching. They used a fMRI to record brain signals for a few hours while the three participants watched movies. A computer recorded the signals and used them with the videos to create a model for what the participants were seeing. After the program was "trained" the participants were shown a couple more video clips, and this time the computer read the signals and picked from a library of 1-second YouTube video clips something close to what the model determined the participant was watching. The researchers then averaged the model's top 100 choices into a compiled video of blurry shapes that are remarkably (and eerily) similar to what the participants were watching. I've included a video clip from the original article at the end.

Anyway, here are some concept sketches for the editorial spot:

There are a lot of different ideas I have... not quite sure which one I like most so far. Right now I'm favoring the TV connected to the head showing a brain on the screen.


More on the research:

Link to video of what the participants saw and what the computer reconstructed. (You might have to be a member of the journal to see it...let me know if it doesn't work.)

*Citations:
Nishimoto, S, AT Vu, T Naselaris, Y Benjamin, N Yu, and JL Gallant. 2011. Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies. Current Biology 21: 1641-1646.