Mind-Reading Scanner Sees Images From Brain, May View Dreams (Tom Randall)

  March 5 (Bloomberg) -- A new way to interpret brain signals accurately identified what people were seeing and may lead to machines that can read minds and reproduce dreams, according to scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

  From a selection of 120 photographs, researchers using brain scans correctly picked the one a test subject was viewing more than 90 percent of the time. Even when the method was wrong, the photos were similar, according to the study published today in the journal Nature.

  The brain model used in the study is a big step toward building devices that can communicate directly with the brain, said Jack Gallant, an author of the study. As scientists adjust the technique and map other areas of the brain, the method may help develop artificial limbs called neural prostheses that are controlled by the brain.

  ``The key innovation is that we have a model for any image,'' said Gallant, an associate professor of psychology at the university's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. ``We're just at the very beginning of building these models. We'd like functional models of all the areas'' of the brain, he said.

  Researchers showed volunteers 1,750 images of people, places and objects. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor the blood flow from neural activity and built a model of how the brain responded to different images.

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