News

News: November/December 2009

Bring me more brains, Igor • Public understanding of philosophy becomes respectable • Ordinary language philosophy revival? — News reports by Sue Roberts

World’s Most Expensive VCR?

A team at University of California Berkeley have discovered how to read the mind’s eye. The visual cortexes of volunteers were scanned while they were watching movies, and the equipment produced crude but continuous video footage of what they were watching. For example, while a volunteer was watching a film clip starring Steve Martin, the screen showed the moving shape of the actor and showed his torso as white (he was wearing a white shirt) but didn’t reproduce his facial features. Professor Jack Gallant, who is controversial in Berkeley as some of his research involves vivisection of primates, described these results in Chicago at the October meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. This raises the fascinating possibility of being able to record dreams.

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