It is quite possible to have your thoughts played out on the computer screen. It’s not a technology you can buy yet, as it in the research phase. However, a Japanese student has been able to walk in a virtual world, on a flat screen monitor, with the character controlled by his brain waves, in Yokohama, in 2007. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Reminds me of the Adventures of Johnny Quest. But now, researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain. It’s just a simple affair of fairly simple dreams, but they hope to be able to play out dreams and secrets of the human mind in the coming future. To explain this a little technically, “When people look at an object, the eye’s retina recognizes an image that is converted into electrical signals which go into the brain’s visual cortex.” Yukiyasu Kamitani’s research team tapped into this and succeeded in catching the signals and then reconstructing what people see.

What they did was show people the six letters in the word “neuron” and then succeeded in reconstructing the letters on a computer screen by measuring their brain activity. It seems like it’s out of a bad sci-fi movie. But hey this is reality. They showed people 400 different still images and figured out their people’s individual brain patterns. Maybe eventually we can record our dreams and watch them later for entertainment value?