Script for the news clip

Introduction: Music playing in the background. Presenters names appear on the screen.

Presenter Kate : Good morning, everyone! Today our topic is about reading images from the
brain. There are thousands of new inventions which can lead us to touch the point of higher
technological experiments. My colleague, Nikita, will explain this in detail.

Presenter Nikita : Good morning, Kate. By scanning blobs of brain activity, scientists may be
able to decode people's thoughts, their dreams and even their intentions.
Neuroscientist often use brain scanning techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging
to see which areas of the brain are active during tasks. Brain decoding looks inside these areas
to identify more subtle patterns, related to particular images or ideas. A typical study would put
someone in a scanner and show them a series of pictures. For each picture, a scanner records
activity in the areas of the brain responsible for vision. A computer program, the decoder, is then
trained to associate each picture with its pattern. To test the decoder, a new picture is
presented. The scanner records the activity again. The decoder then compares the new pattern
to the pattern it knows from training to figure out what type of object the person was looking at.




Presenter Kate:
-Devising a decoding model that can generalize across brains, and even for the same brain
across time, is a complex problem. Decoders are generally built on individual brains, unless
they're computing something relatively simple such as a binary choice whether someone was
looking at picture A or B. But several groups are now working on building one-size-fits-all
models. Everyone's brain is a little bit different, says Haxby, who is leading one such effort. At
the moment, he says, you just can't line up these patterns of activity well enough.
Other scientists also dismiss the implication that buried memories could be reliably uncovered
through decoding. Apart from anything else, you need a 15-tonne, US$3-million fMRI machine.

Presenter Nikita: Nodding...

Presenter Kate:
In the study, scientists hooked participants up to an fMRI brain scanner which determines
activity in different parts of the brain by measuring blood flow and showed them images of
faces. Then, using only the brain scans, the scientists were able to create images of the faces
the people were looking at.
While the reconstructions based on 30 brain readings are blurry, they approximate the true
images. They got the skin color right in all of them, and 24 out of 30 reconstructions correctly
detected the presence or absence of a smile.
The brain readings were worse at determining gender and hair color: About two-thirds of the
reconstructions clearly detected the gender, and only half got hair color correct.





Interview with expert(Nikita):

Theres definitely room for improvement. These experiments were conducted two years ago,
though they only recently were accepted for publication.Others have been working on improving
the process.The results should get better.
How does the experiment take place?
The experiment usually goes like this: the scientists show participants in the study 300 faces
while recording their brain activity. Then they show the participants 30 new faces and use their
previously recorded patterns to create 30 images based only on their brain scans.
Once the technology improves applications could range from better understanding mental
disorders, to recording dreams, to solving crimes.
How can this technology help people?
This technology can also help people with different diseases. If an autistic person sees a face
differently, the difference will show up in the brain scan reconstruction.
And you can even imagine, way down the road, a witness to a crime might want to come in and
reconstruct a suspects face.
How soon could that happen?
Well, it really depends on advances in brain imaging technology, more so than the mathematical
analysis. It could be 10, 20 years away.
One challenge is that different brains show different activity for the same image. The blurry
images pictured here are actually averages of the thoughts of six lab volunteers.So as of right
now its a bit inconsistent.
For now you shouldnt worry about others snooping on your memories or forcibly extracting
information.This sort of technology can only read active parts of the brain. So you couldnt read
passive memories you would have to get the person to imagine the memory to read it.
Its a matter of time, and eventually maybe 200 years from now well have some way of
reading inactive parts of the brain. But thats a much harder problem, as it involves measuring
very fine details of brain structure that we dont even really understand.
Thank You.