Brain activity is too complicated for humans to decipher. Machines can decode it for us.

Brain activity is too complicated for humans to decipher. Machines can decode it for us.

Over the past several years, Jack Gallant’s neuroscience lab has produced a string of papers that sound absurd. In 2011, the lab showed it was possible to recreate movie clips just from observing the brain activity of people watching movies. Using a computer to regenerate the images of a film just by scanning the brain of a person watching one is, in a sense, mind reading. Similarly, in 2015, Gallant’s team of scientists predicted which famous paintings people were picturing in their minds by observing the activity of their brains. This year, the team announced in the journal Nature that they had created an “atlas” of where 10,000-plus individual words reside in the brain — just by having study participants listen to podcasts. How did they do all this? By…


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