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AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

newscientist.com

31–40 of 40 posts

Re: AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

#31

Maybe I missed this, but isn't the underlying concept here big news? Am I understanding this right? It seems that by reading areas of the brain, a machine can effectively act as a rendering engine with knowledge on colour, brightness etc per pixel based on an image the person is seeing? And AI is being used to help because this method is lossy? This seems huge, is there other terminology around this I can kagi to und…

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. This seems like it's inputting an image to the Monkeys eyes and then figuring out how that particular input maps to brain activity. Someone would have to fight me here, but with enough input, we should be able to mostly figure out how things map. As in, we can perfect this ...

Re: AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

#32

Big jump when we go from decoding what you’re seeing to what you’re thinking.

This is a big jump ethically, but technically it feels like it's a hop away. If we can do this for visual images, we could use the same strategy on patterns of thought - especially if the person is a skilled at visualisation.

There are no ethics in China.

Re: AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

#33
post #14

The paper, at least as shown here, [1] is vague about which results came from implanted electrodes and which came from functional MRI data. Functional MRI data is showing blood flow. It's like looking at an IC with a thermal imager and trying to figure out what it is doing. [1] https://archive.is/650Az

Just to clarify, the paper [0] does use both implanted electrodes and fMRI data, but it is actually quite transparent about which data came from which source. The authors worked with two datasets: the B2G dataset, which includes multi-unit activity from implanted Utah arrays in macaques, and the Shen-19 dataset, which uses noninvasive fMRI from human participants. You’re right that fMRI measures blood flow rather tha…

[deleted]

Re: AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

#34
post #19

I hope one day we can turn this on for coma patients and see if they're dreaming or otherwise processing the world.

Using these techniques, never. The electrode methods can only see a tiny section of processing and are missing all the information elsewhere. fMRI is very low resolution. Because of this they are all very overfitted- they cue off very particular subject-specific quirks that will not generalize well. More importantly, these techniques operate on the V1, V4 and inferior temporal cortex areas of the brain. These areas w…

He did say “one day”

Re: AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

#36
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a big jump ethically, but technically it feels like it's a hop away. If we can do this for visual images, we could use the same strategy on patterns of thought - especially if the person is a skilled at visualisation.

There are no ethics in China.

There are no ethics in America

Re: AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

#37
post #14

The paper, at least as shown here, [1] is vague about which results came from implanted electrodes and which came from functional MRI data. Functional MRI data is showing blood flow. It's like looking at an IC with a thermal imager and trying to figure out what it is doing. [1] https://archive.is/650Az

That could be an interesting project in itself, take a simple 8 but microcontroller, a thermal camera, and some code that does different kinds of operations, see if you can train a classification model at least, or even generate the code running via an image to text llm.

Please stop giving me project ideas. :)

Re: AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

#39

Big jump when we go from decoding what you’re seeing to what you’re thinking.

This is a big jump ethically, but technically it feels like it's a hop away. If we can do this for visual images, we could use the same strategy on patterns of thought - especially if the person is a skilled at visualisation.

"Feels" and "is" are quite different in these domains. Self-driving feels like it's 5 years away for 10 years straight, and biology is infinitely more complex than automation. See this comment from this thread [0].

> These techniques operate on the V1, V4 and inferior temporal cortex areas of the brain. These areas will fire in response to retina stimulation regardless of what's happening in the rest of your brain. V1 in particular is connected directly to your retinas. While deeper areas may be sympathetically activated by hallucinations etc, they aren't really related to your conception of things. In general if you want to read someone's thoughts you would look elsewhere in the brain.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43910953

Re: AI focused on brain regions recreates what you're looking at (2024)

#40
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using these techniques, never. The electrode methods can only see a tiny section of processing and are missing all the information elsewhere. fMRI is very low resolution. Because of this they are all very overfitted- they cue off very particular subject-specific quirks that will not generalize well. More importantly, these techniques operate on the V1, V4 and inferior temporal cortex areas of the brain. These areas w…

He did say “one day”

One day using different techniques. Not these techniques.
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