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That's pretty impressive. This new work seems like a step forward because it's getting the information from slightly further downstream - the visual cortex whic
by exporectomy 6y ago
That's pretty impressive. This new work seems like a step forward because it's getting the information from slightly further downstream - the visual cortex which is what the LGN feeds into. But it's still not magic because it was already known that there's a mapping between points in the 2D field of view and points in the 2D layers of the visual cortex. That mapping is already known to be very simple for the V1 layer which is one of the 3 layers of the visual cortex that this technique uses. It also uses the V2 and V3 layers that seem to me to have a higher level representation and doesn't perform as well on them.
Still, this seems like a step towards reading people's imaginations, and they hint at that in the conclusion with "While admittedly the promise of algorithms that reconstruct internally generated or externally induced percepts is yet to be fully achieved".
Not that I know what I'm talking about. Feel free to point out any minunderstandings I've shown.
- newswasboring 6y ago>While admittedly the promise of algorithms that reconstruct internally generated or externally induced percepts is yet to be fully achieved I find this kind of writing kind of sad. It seems to me that the authors clearly wanted to write something about reading minds, and its quite logical. But they have to write in this obtuse, dry way because even in speculation they need to be precise. I am not sure if this is good or bad practice, but its pervasive in academic writing and I don't like it. A paper should not lose credibility because they went on a flight of fancy for a sentence or two.
- exporectomy 6y agoA lot of things in academic writing are awful. Passive voice, for instance. Who didn't fully achieve it? These authors or all of humanity? And yea, the sentence is so safe that it really has no meaning because "not fully achieved" is consistent with both "not achieved at all" and "almost perfect".
- 29athrowaway 6y agoIt is indeed a step forward in another respect as well: they can recreate images using fMRI rather than electrodes, a non-invasive procedure.