People on Twitter are jumping to the conclusion that this allows you to read someone’s mind but maybe all it does is allow to you to reconstruct something simil

People on Twitter are jumping to the conclusion that this allows you to read someone’s mind but maybe all it does is allow to you to reconstruct something similar to what they are looking at. For example if you recorded the activity of every cell in the retina, you would be able to do good image reconstruction but no one would interpret this as mind reading. It’s possible that this is a similar story but instead of the retina, the decoder is just getting all of its signal from early visual cortex and therefore it’s not doing anything that a well placed camera pointing the same way as the subjects eye couldn’t do. Yes, in principle it’s possibly doing more than that and using signal from eg inferotemporal cortex, but how much? There is no evidence it is doing anything beyond simply leveraging the retinotopic organization of primary visual cortex here.