Here's Why

What the cat saw

At the University of California, Berkeley, scientists Stanley, Li and Dan can jack into brains and extract video.

This is a step towards a future portrayed in the movie "Strange Days" and the movie "Brainstorm", where not only vision, but all your other sensory experiences could be measured, recorded, and played back using superconducting quantum interference devices, or SQUIDS. Using a SQUID means that unlike the Californians, you could pick up tiny specific brain signals without surgery, wearing a helmet that can pick up the weak magnetic fields. SQUID technology that good is still science fiction.

In 1999 the team recorded the electrical signals from one hundred and seventy-seven neurons in the brains of cats selected for good vision. They recorded signals from a part of the cat's thalamus, which integrates all of the brain's sensory input, while they showed the cats sixteen second movies of indoor and outdoor scenes; trees and faces. By applying mathematical filtering software to the signals, they could generate movies of what the cat had actually seen. The limitations of the early technology meant that the movies lack colour and were blurrier than what the cat actually saw, they've turned out to be stunningly faithful to the original movies. They weren't looking at the cat's memories, but at the signals that were being processed by the cat's brain from its eyes as it watched the movies. Seeing what the cat saw.

In 1999 they were only able to look at ten neurons at a time and so they couldn't reconstruct the video in real-time, but this is an amazing beginning. Sampling more cells will give a clearer picture and colour information. From the structure of cat's eyes we can guess that they see less of the red and brown than we see, but more of the purple and green. The team have since been recording and decoding other senses and also looking at sending back encoded signals directly to the nervous system. The future of this technology could see people using their own eyes and brain as a video camera. You will literally see the director's vision of the movie.

For those cat lovers out there, I can assure you that although the experiment might have looked like something out of "A Clockwork Orange", the cats were gently anesthetized, and didn't suffer any pain or distress.

We now know what raw experience looks like inside the brain of another being. This means that entire philosophies of mind that were based on the idea that internal experience would forever be private and therefore not subject to objective investigation, have been rendered obsolete. We will be able to see how other people look at things. The researchers are also working on brain signals controlling prosthetics such as an artificial larynx for people who have lost their voice-box to cancer.

They are working on a wireless brain recording system based on surgically implanting electrodes and a tiny radio transmitter. The raw signals would be picked up by a receiver and decoded by computer. Their first use of this will be to record the complex environmental information that rats sense from their whiskers brushing against things as they move. Recording their sense of touch.

This technology has the potential to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and mobility to the paralyzed and injured.

Being able to record and play back movies, sounds and maybe one day touch, straight to the brain could be the ultimate theatre experience.

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Science, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, research assistant, Cisco CCNA tutor, Physics laboratory demonstrator, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to freelance writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Diffusion radio science show on radio 2SER 107.3FM Monday at 6:30pm in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Diffusion podcasts. You should follow me on twitter, here