Science Breakthroughs in 2011: Cancer Vaccines, 3-D Printing, and More

Picture this: scientists reconstructed the moving images in people’s minds by measuring their brain activity as they watched movie clips. First, they decoded the brain signals and created a catalog that associated brain patterns with what people were watching on the screen. The computer then compared that to a library of 5,000 hours of YouTube video to predict the brain’s activity when watching a particular video. The clips that the computer deemed the most likely ones that a person watched were finally merged to reconstruct the original image they saw. In the future, the technology could be used to decipher what people who aren’t able to communicate—if they are in coma or have a neurodegenerative disease, for example—are seeing.