Scientists reconstruct video based on brain activity

This is so scary! Researchers from UC Berkeley actually pieced together the brain patterns of its subjects as they watched YouTube videos, and then produced a YouTube video of their own with the results. If such technology is improved further, this is so privacy intrusive (in my opinion).

The left clip is a segment of the movie that the subject viewed while in the magnet. The right clip shows the reconstruction of this movie from brain activity measured using fMRI. The reconstruction was obtained using only each subject's brain activity and a library of 18 million seconds of random YouTube video. (In brief, the algorithm processes each of the 18 million clips through the brain model, and identifies the clips that would have produced brain activity as similar to the measured brain activity as possible. The clips used to fit the model, those used to test the model and those used to reconstruct the stimulus were entirely separate.) Brain activity was sampled every one second, and each one-second section of the viewed movie was reconstructed separately.