If someone were looking at a letter of the alphabet that was blocked from your view, would you be able to accurately guess what that letter was? Well, if you were at Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands, you might not have to guess or call in a psychic. Scientists there have used an MRI scanner and a mathematical model to read observed letters, right out of test subjects’ brains.
The researchers started by virtually (not physically!) dividing each subject’s visual cortex up into a matrix of 1,200 cubic sections known as voxels – each voxel, in this particular study, measured 2 mm per side. Using the MRI, the scientists then noted how those voxels electrically responded to visual stimuli. When the subjects were subsequently shown hand-written letters, the overall pattern of all the responsive voxels (as viewed via the MRI, and processed using the mathematical model) could be used to roughly reconstruct an image of each letter.
via Gizmag
