Scientists Read Images Directly Out of the Brain

This is very cool. This was accomplished in cats several years ago, so it is not too surprising that reading visual images straight out of the brain can be done in humans.

The visual system is the part of the cerebral cortex that is understood the best. This finding is relatively straight forward in some ways because the lower level areas of visual cortex have a direct correspondence to specific sites on the retina (retinotopic organization). In other words, part A in the retina goes to part A of the primary visual cortex, part B goes to part B of the primary visual cortex and so on. So if you knew what areas of primary visual cortex were being activated you could develop a good idea of the image that was being processed by the retina.

The reason I'm going into this level of detail is to make the point that it is going to be much more difficult to do this kind of thing with thoughts, intentions, decisions and other cognitive phenomena. These are not nearly as well understood as vision. But maybe it will be possible to process cognitive processes like this someday.