Zombie Scientist Seeks Fun-Loving Brain

This post doesn't have much to do with Zombies, but it IS about brains.

Reading brains!

Just when you thought the brain was an enigma...

...you were right.

But we are making progress in understanding it better. Like take this experiment for example:

Reconstructing visual images by using MRI scans of the visual cortex. Awesome.

[Reconstructed visual images. The reconstruction results of all trials for two subjects are shown with the presented images from the figure image session. The reconstructed images are sorted in ascending order of the mean square error. For the purpose of illustration, each patch is depicted by a homogeneous square, whose intensity represents the contrast of the checkerboard pattern. Each reconstructed image was produced from the data of a single trial, and no postprocessing was applied. The mean images of the reconstructed images are presented at the bottom row. The same images of the alphabet letter ''n'' are displayed in the rightmost and leftmost columns.]

We are a long way from being about to do half of the fun (and fearsome) things that belong to the realm of science-fiction, but this is a brilliant step. As PZ says, visual reconstruction is only possible so easily (relatively speaking) because of the neat mapping onto the visual cortex of what we see. Reading somebody's memory, for example, would require a greater mastery of larger and more distributed areas of the brain.

Still, Johnny Mnemonic and Neo's "Whoa! I know kung fu" here we come.