An article over at kuro5hin led me to this blog entry about a researcher’s work on extracting video from cat brains.
The study, from 1999, couldn’t have been much fun for the cats (the description of the preparation process in the paper is remarkably gruesome, even under all of the medical jargon), but the results are pretty cool. They played video in front of the cats, then tried to extract the resulting images from the cats’ brains.
The image below shows, side-by-side, what was displayed in the video and what they were able to extract from the cat brains. Pretty cool stuff, especially when you realize that the neurons they pulled these images from could, with the proper stimulation, be used to input imagery directly into the brain as well.
It’s weird, I have no interest in Lasik surgery, but I think I’d be one of the first in line for a cranial IO jack.
