Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

biorxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 97 posts

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#61

Post by trashtester »

Elv13 wrote: post #5

Next: All you need to do to make the next billion $ movie is your imagination, literally (and a 100m$ helium cooled MRI machine, and 25$ worth of AWS credits).

The critical component is your imagination. If your imagination is at that level, you are likely to be successful in Holywood,even today.

But I think the greatest utility of this tech is not in the movie industry, but in the gaming industry.

Imagine a photo realistic version of sims where your family and friends know EXACTLY how to react to maximize your sense of meaning, happiness, enjoyment in precisely the way that is needed in order to prevent you from leaving the game?

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#62

Post by bemmu »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #37
lsh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is also evidence this ability to conjure imagery in our minds simply does not exist for some: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia which leads me to wonder if the capability exists on a spectrum and is stronger or weaker in some. A stronger capability might correlate to a stronger 'signal' ...?

Do people actually see images of things in their head? I can close my eyes and think of something, but I won't perceive anything more than a linear description of it. At best, I can use these visual descriptions to draw an outline in my head, but it instantly fades out if I don't continuously re-draw it. Kind of like this: https://i.imgur.com/0zuPIPV.gifv

What you described is exactly how I experience things in my head as well, including that redrawing part.

I've noticed though that as I've spent years learning Japanese characters, I am somewhat better at visualizing them in my head. I can see (or "feel", as it's not really visual exactly in the same sense as seeing, although they are not just concepts but have spatial locations) whole subcomponents at a time instead of having to plot each line.

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#63

Post by [deleted] »

Henk0 wrote: post #53
ghkbrew wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supposedly, most people do. There was an article on hn about "aphantasia" (the lack of mental imagery) not to long ago, but I can't seem to find it now. Google turns up quite a few hits though. I can't help but be a little sceptical of the concept though. I believe there's probably a spectrum but maybe not as wide is claimed. Based on the comment sections of basically any article on the subect, I wonder if there isn'…

Aphantasia is definitely real. My inner visual world has always consisted of the view of the inside of my eyelids. Thinking for me is an almost purely verbal process, in an inner voice that I don’t percieve as sound in any way. I can navigate in my mind, and describe accurately places I’ve been, but there’s never an image, only a kind of spatial perception, combined with knowledge (of materials, colors etc.) I though…

[deleted]

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#64

Post by [deleted] »

jfoutz wrote: post #17
gamegoblin wrote: post #15

Acknowledging that I know nothing about psychology or neuroscience... It's interesting that they were not able to extract good images from the test when they just asked the subjects to imagine the pictures. I speculate that is because the vast majority of people are able to recognize images of things, but not produce those images. For a simple example, see this article about people trying to draw a bicycle. Before cl…

Feynman wrote about this in one of his books. it's really hard to understand how someone else understands something. but you can say, well imagine it's orange and spherical and kind of hairy, and they'll have a picture in their mind you can kinda work with.

[deleted]

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#65

Post by bemmu »

jfoutz wrote: post #17
gamegoblin wrote: post #15

Acknowledging that I know nothing about psychology or neuroscience... It's interesting that they were not able to extract good images from the test when they just asked the subjects to imagine the pictures. I speculate that is because the vast majority of people are able to recognize images of things, but not produce those images. For a simple example, see this article about people trying to draw a bicycle. Before cl…

Feynman wrote about this in one of his books. it's really hard to understand how someone else understands something. but you can say, well imagine it's orange and spherical and kind of hairy, and they'll have a picture in their mind you can kinda work with.

From "What Do You Care What Other People Think":

I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker. We both had “labs” at home, and we would do various “experiments.” One time, we were discussing something — we must have been eleven or twelve at the time — and I said, “But thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside.

“Oh yeah?” Bernie said. “Do you know the crazy shape of the crankshaft in a car?”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Good. Now, tell me: how did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?”

So I learned from Bernie that thoughts can be visual as well as verbal.

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#66

Post by docbrown »

zadler wrote: post #59
docbrown wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basing this on my rough memory of abnormal and developmental psych, the article and example you’re presenting is a type of Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rey%E2%80%93Osterrieth_complex... ]. Some people may be able to produce a bicycle in more details than others but that depends on how developed and healthy their brain is to use their executive functions . Without knowing all of the su…

How does one improve brain health?

Harvard updated their Buzzfeedesque post on this topic [https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/12-ways-to-keep...] which spans from crossword puzzles to avoiding alcohol.

But to keep it simple: read, do puzzles, stay active, do not drink or do drugs heavily. ——

Everybody already has a genetic makeup that limits their health—especially the brain—to a preset level. Some people suffer from infantile amnesia—basically not remembering early developmental stages (2-4) and preadolescent (~10 y/o); other’s claim to remember their birth (which is silly since ability to form memories is 2 y/o+). Some have the luxury of having strong working memory^1—a fancy word for temporary memories—but suffers from lackluster short-term memory.

I’m sure you get the point I was trying to make with that mediocre explanation.

tldr: You can not change your brain to not have dementia if your genetic makeup says so. You can however delay the onset possibly by keeping your brain active on a daily basis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#67

Post by icc97 »

From the paper:

> We used the Caffe implementation (Jia et al., 2014) of the VGG19 deep neural network (DNN) model (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2015; available from https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/wiki/Model - Zoo) . All visual images were resized to 224 × 224 pixels to compute outputs by the VGG19 model . The VGG19 model consisted of a total of sixteen convolutional layers and three fully connected layers.

They used a VGG-19 network for the feature detection, so in my basic understanding the results of this could already be improved by switching to a ResNet.

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#68

Post by hardmaru »

icc97 wrote: post #67

From the paper: > We used the Caffe implementation (Jia et al., 2014) of the VGG19 deep neural network (DNN) model (Simonyan & Zisserman, 2015; available from https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/wiki/Model - Zoo) . All visual images were resized to 224 × 224 pixels to compute outputs by the VGG19 model . The VGG19 model consisted of a total of sixteen convolutional layers and three fully connected layers. They used a VGG-1…

Not necessarily. While ResNets are optimized for the task of achieving the best image classification accuracy, it is no guarantee that the features extracted from it will transfer well to other tasks such as this one, especially when the task is to generate images. In fact, it has been shown that pre-trained VGG networks are a lot more useful than pre-trained ResNet for other tasks other than image classification, such as style transfer.

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#69

Post by youwishboye »

randomdrake wrote: post #4

The code and data for these amazing results have been generously made available here: https://github.com/KamitaniLab/DeepImageReconstruction The code is well-commented Python and a pleasure to read.

awesome! now I just need an fMRI machine...

Re: Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity (2017)

#70

Post by jeppz »

userbinator wrote: post #45

This is impressive, and certainly technology like this will probably find lots of very good uses, but I can't help imagining(!) dystopian societies where "thoughtcrime" can actually be monitored and "made actionable". A world in which "you have nothing to hide" turns into "you have nothing you can hide" is immensely disturbing.

When most people are connected to the cloud we will no longer need public security cameras, there will be someone on site automatically uploading what they saw.
Post reply on HN